Tim Cook (Marie-Louise Deruaz)

Author and historian Tim Cook, who served as the chief historian of the Canadian War Museum, has died. He was 54.

The Canadian War Museum announced Cook’s death on Oct. 26.

Cook joined the museum in 2002, where he served as the First World War historian until being named chief historian and director of research in 2022.

“Tim Cook was a passionate ambassador both for the Museum and for Canadian military history,” Caroline Dromaguet, president and CEO of the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Museum of History, said in a press release. “He has forever left his own mark on history.”

In addition to his work at the museum, where he led major updates to the galleries, research, publications, lectures and international outreach, Cook was also an award-winning author. Since publishing his first book in 1999, he has written and edited more than 20 books about the Canadian wartime experience.

His first book, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (UBC Press), won the C.P. Stacey Award for most distinguished book in Canadian military history. Many of his subsequent titles were award winners and finalists, recognized by juries of multiple awards across Canada, including the Ottawa Book Awards (which he last won in 2023 for Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War), the Charles Taylor Prize (which he won in 2009 for Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918), and the Lionel Gelber Prize, for which his most recent book, The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War, was shortlisted this year.

His forthcoming book, The Unquiet Western Front, will be published in 2026 by Allen Lane Canada.

“There is little we can say to add to Tim’s legacy. His many awards and the lasting impression his work has left on a generation of readers say more than any of us can,”  Nick Garrison, publishing director of Allen Lane, said in a press release. “But no award captures what Tim meant to us. Over the course of many years and many books, Tim came to be known to all of us as much for his warmth and generosity of spirit as he was for his talent as a writer, and as eager to talk about family as he was to talk about history. He will be bitterly missed by all who worked with him and admired him.”

Cook was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2014 and a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2019.