Kate Beaton has won the 2023 Canada Reads competition for her graphic memoir.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, which Q&Q reviewer Andrew Woodrow-Butcher called “political, personal, monumental, intimate, generous, upsetting, surreal, and disarmingly human,” is the first graphic novel to win Canada Reads.

Beaton’s book, published last July by Drawn & Quarterly, was championed by Jeopardy! super-champion Mattea Roach, and beat out the other remaining book, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, in Thursday’s final vote. Station Eleven was championed by actor Michael Greyeyes.

Ducks and Station Eleven were two of the five books featured in this year’s competition, which was hosted by Ali Hassan. The theme of this year’s battle of the books was “one book to shift your perspective.”

Beaton said on Thursday’s CBC finale that she hopes readers take to heart the fact that the issues raised in her book, which covers her time working in the oilsands in 2008, are still happening today.

“I hope that reading my book, even though it is a time capsule of a time when I was a very young person working in an industry that I didn’t know very much about, gives you perspective on what it’s like to be in there, and realize that these things are ongoing issues and they often happen away from things,” Beaton said. “If there was a five-million litre toxic waste leak into the Toronto water system, we would have a much different reaction than a sort of continued indifference, which is what we see when things happen on Indigenous lands surrounding the extraction areas.”