The latest winner of the Spur Award for Contemporary Nonfiction is featured below along with a complete list of all past winners of the Spur Award for Cotemporary Nonfiction. Before 1993 contemporary nonfiction was included in the general nonfiction category. We also provide links to the other Spur Awards and to our index of all book awards featured on Happy Dead Trees.

"The Spur Awards, given annually for distinguished writing about the American West, are among the oldest and most prestigious in American literature."

The latest winner of the Spur Award for Contemporary Nonfiction

2009 - Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School—Basketball Champions of the World by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith  [2009 winner will announced Spring 2010] 

All past winners of the Spur Award for Contemporary Nonfiction

1993 - Rivers in the Desert by Margaret Leslie Davis

1994 - Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River by Ellen Meloy

1995 - We Are a People in This World by Conger Beasley, Jr.

1996 - New Westers: The West in Contemporary American Culture by Michael L. Johnson

1997 - Seems to skip a year because the awards are now dated by the year a book wins, rather than the year it was published.

1998 - Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas

1999 - Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West by Hal K. Rothman

2000 - The Real Wild West by Michael Wallis

2001 - What You See In Clear Water by Geoffrey O'Gara

2002 - Bone Wars by Tom Rea

2003 - Diné: A History of the Navajos by Peter Iverson

2004 - River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

2005 - The Texas Rangers and The Mexican Revolution by Charles H. Harris, III and Louis R. Sadler

2006 - Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893 - 1923 by David Dorado Romo

2007 - Copper Chorus: Mining Politics and the Montana Press, 1889 - 1959 by Dennis L. Swibold

2008 - Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley

2009 - Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School—Basketball Champions of the World by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith

2010 - Will be announced Spring 2010

Spur Award for Western Writing General Nonfiction 1954 to 1992 > > >

The Official Website of the Western Writers of America Spur Awards

(Visit our Book Awards Index for a complete list of the dozens of book awards listed on Happy Dead Trees.)