Canadian Writers Abroad

by Debra Martens

“Lest we forget” is easy enough to say, but how do you set about helping Canadians remember their war dead when they’d rather not think about war at all? Canada’s war historian, or public historian, or military historian, Tim Cook (1971-2025) spent his life doing just that. Cook died on October 26, 2025, at age 53. The author of a dozen books on Canada’s role in the World Wars has looked at war from top to bottom (generals to soldiers), and sideways, too (medical, agricultural, domestic industry). He began each day with writing, but then he went on to a full day, working at the Canadian War Museum as Chief Historian and Director of Research, starting as the First World War historian in 2002, and then Chief Historian and Director of Research from 2020. In 2013, he received the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history. In 2019, he was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada. He was named to the Order of Canada in 2014.

His colleague, Stacey Barker (Historian, Arts and Military History), describes him as “a dynamo when it came to work; he had a breathtaking capacity for researching and writing. But even though he was always working on his next book, the next article, the next book review, he was extremely generous with his time and guidance, he was always ready to listen to colleagues and to offer advice and encouragement.”

For the First World War, 619,636 Canadians enlisted or were conscripted to form the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), there were 10,000 sailors in the Royal Canadian Navy, joined by about 2,800 nurses. Over 50,000 were active in the British forces. For the Second World War, 1.1 million Canadians were in uniform, 45,000 were killed, and 55,000 injured. We are asked to remember them only once a year. Tim Cook remembered every day, and after I saw his list of publications, I wondered how he went on, writing about war year after year.

Here is Stacey Barker’s take on what enabled Tim Cook to keep on writing about war:

“People who study war, including myself, do so for a myriad of reasons. War is one of the most intense of human experiences, and it shapes us in ways we sometimes don’t recognize or perhaps don’t want to recognize. Tim’s approach, and his gift, frankly, was to humanize war – to show us the impacts that it had on individual lives as well as nations and societies. And I think that’s one of the things that made his work so accessible to so many. And you are right – war is not an easy thing to write about or to study, but it is one that feels necessary (if that makes sense) because of how serious a subject it is and how devastating it can be.
I think Tim was, at heart, a storyteller. He wanted to tell these stories of people whose lives were changed by war, whether they were generals or privates. I feel that he wanted to show Canadians that their past mattered, that our military history is important, and that it is relevant to who we are today.”

One way to keep war alive in memory is to make it relevant to today’s events, which Cook does with his most recent book, The Good Allies (Penguin Random House Canada, 2025), examining the relationship between Canada and the United States during the Second World War. From the book’s blurb: “In North America, Canada and the US strained to forge a new military alliance to guard their coasts and fend off German U-boats and the menace of a Japanese invasion. Wartime economies were entwined to produce a staggering contribution of weapons to keep Britain and other allies in the war. The defence of North America against enemy threats was essential before the US and Canada could send armies, navies, and air forces overseas.” And now it would seem we are disentangling this defence to some degree.

His book, Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (Penguin Canada, 2018) (which begins with five maps…), won the 2018 J.W. Dafoe Prize. He first earned the Dafoe prize in 2008 for At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914-1916, Volume One. He received the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction in 2009 for Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918, Volume Two. Some of his 19 books include:

• Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War (Penguin Canada, 2023).
• The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada’s Second World War (Penguin Canada, 2021).
• The Secret History of Soldiers: How Canadians Survived the Great War (Penguin Canada, 2019).
• Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War, 1944-1945, Volume Two (Penguin Canada 2016).
• The Necessary War: Canadians Fighting the Second World War, 1919-1941, Volume One (Penguin Canada, 2015).
• Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars (Penguin Canada, 2013).
• The Madman and the Butcher: the Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie (Penguin Canada, 2011).
• Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars (UBC Press, 2006).

Tim Cook will be missed. Stacey Barker, at the Canadian War Museum: “His laugh, his presence, his toughness. I will miss his leadership, his brilliant writing, his intellect, and his collegial support.”

• Canadian War Museum.
• Penguin Random House Canada
• Royal Society of Canada
• “Many Battles” — J.D.M Stewart Remembers the historian Tim Cook, Bookworm, Literary Review of Canada, November 8, 2025.
• Listen to Tim Cook on the Paul Wells podcast.
• A full obituary can be found in The Globe and Mail: “Public historian Tim Cook told compelling stories about Canada’s soldiers,” by Frank B. Edwards (November 6, 2025).