Dr. Jillian Horton has won the 2022 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for her book We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing.

The $10,000 award honours Canadian authors of a first or second book of nonfiction that includes a Canadian location or Canadian significance.

Award juror Bruce Gillespie said that Horton’s memoir “offers rich insight into the high-stress lives of physicians even before the pandemic.” We Are All Perfectly Fine (HarperCollins Publishers) chronicles the five days that Horton, a general internist, spent at a Zen centre in upstate New York with a group of other burnt-out doctors, throwing into relief the often unacknowledged professional stress doctors experience.

This is not the first award for the book; Horton was also named a co-winner of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, and was shortlisted for three High Plains book awards.

The award is administered by Wilfrid Laurier University. The process of awarding the 2022 winner was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.