Established thirty-five years ago in 1972 by Kirk Howard, Dundurn Press Limited started primarily as a small publisher of Canadian history, military history, politics, current affairs, and biography. Since then Dundurn has expanded its original publishing mandate to include lavishly illustrated, well-researched art books dealing with respected painters such as Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, and the female artists of the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal, as well as works on important Canadian cultural institutions such as the Canadian Opera Company, the Stratford Festival, and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

In 1991, Dundurn was awarded the forty-six-volume book contract (twenty-six books in English, twenty-six books in French) to publish the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing. To maintain the expansion flowing from this massive undertaking, Dundurn acquired three small distinguished Canadian publishers in the 1990s: Hounslow Press, Simon & Pierre, and Boardwalk Books. In December 2005, Dundurn purchased Sandcastle Book’s award-winning thirty-eight-title junior fiction list from Beach Holme Publishing (originally founded as Press Porcépic in 1971 by Dave Godfrey). In January 2007, Dundurn acquired the assets of another well-regarded small Canadian publishing company, Natural Heritage Books, which specializes in publishing titles of exceptional quality that concentrate on Canadian heritage, natural history, and biography. Started in 1983 by Barry Penhale, Natural Heritage has published over two hundred titles of which approximately one hundred titles are still in print. The press, now one of Dundurn’s imprints, releases seven to twelve new books each year. In June 2007, Dundurn also acquired Beach Holme’s adult list, which features literary fiction, drama, and poetry by such well-respected writers as James Reaney, Mark Frutkin, Joe Rosenblatt, Patrick Friesen, Robin Skelton, Marilyn Bowering, Evelyn Lau, Lesley Choyce, Dave Margoshes, Susan Musgrave, and Dorothy Livesay.

Since 1972, Dundurn Press and its associated imprints have published over 1,450 titles of which 650 are still in print. The Dundurn Group publishes about seventy-five to eighty new titles per year and is now one of the largest publishers of adult and children’s fiction and non-fiction in Canada. Currently, there are eighteen employees spread over a number of departments, most of whom work out of the company’s expanded office space in the St. Lawrence Market area of downtown Toronto.

Books published by The Dundurn Group have won or been nominated for many awards and distinctions, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Translation; the City of Ottawa Book Award; the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography; the Commonwealth Writers Prize; the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; the Edgar Allan Poe Award; and the Arthur Ellis Award for Mystery Fiction. Dundurn’s children’s imprints have also won or been nominated for numerous awards, including the Sheila A. Egoff Award, the Red Cedar Award, the Silver Birch Award, the White Pine and Red Maple Awards, the Ann Connor Brimer Children’s Literature Prize, and the CLA Children’s Book of the Year.

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