Author Terry Gould wins J.W. Dafoe Book Prize for Worth Dying For

Vancouver author Terry Gould will be in Winnipeg on Thursday (May 14) to receive a prestigious award for Worth Dying For: Canada's Mission to Train Police in the World's Failing States (Random House Canada).

The J.W. Dafoe Book Prize is granted to the author of the best book on Canada, Canadians, or Canada's place in the world over the previous year. The honour includes a $10,000 cheque and is named after the legendary Canadian journalist who edited the Manitoba Free Press and Winnipeg Free Press from 1901 to 1944.

Worth Dying For is Gould's fourth book and tells the story of RCMP and municipal and provincial police officers who travel to troubled and failed states to train cops. As part of his research, Gould visited Afghanistan, Haiti, and Palestine.

In an interview last year with the the CTV program Power Play, he described how Canadian police officers "endure roasting heat [and] assassination threats from criminal cops, all to train foreign police forces under very corrupt regimes to keep bad people from hurting good people".

"They live by that humanitarian mission," Gould said.

Gould pointed out that the last two elections in Afghanistan were able to occur, in part, because Canadians trained police officers who protected polling stations.

Yet when these Canadians complete these dangerous missions, they sometimes return home with posttraumatic stress disorder. Gould also noted on CTV that some have been taken hostage and tortured.

The man on the cover of Worth Dying For is Joe McAllister, a retired Vancouver-area Mountie who has spent a great deal of time advising police in Afghanistan.