2025 - Jay Lalonde

2025 Goodman Writers Grant Recipient: Jay Lalonde

Support for a Groundbreaking History of Icelandic Settlers in Atlantic Canada

The Canada Iceland Foundation is pleased to announce that the 2025 Goodman Writers Grant, valued at $4,000, has been awarded to Jay Lalonde, a historian whose work is reshaping our understanding of Icelandic settlement in Atlantic Canada. This support will assist Jay in the publication of his forthcoming narrative non-fiction scholarly monograph, Markland: Icelandic Settlers in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1867–1885 (working title).

The Goodman Writers Grant is designed to help authors publish original work that strengthens the understanding of Icelandic history, heritage, and culture in North America. Jay’s project exemplifies this mission. Their book—now in its final dissertation stages at the University of New Brunswick—will be the first comprehensive history of the Icelandic settlement at Markland in Nova Scotia’s Musquodoboit Valley (1875–1882) and of the broader attempts to settle Icelanders in Atlantic Canada during the 1870s.

While Icelandic migration to the Canadian Prairies is widely known, the story of the Atlantic Canada settlement has been largely overlooked or reduced to passing mentions as “another failed colony.” Jay’s research challenges that narrative. Through meticulous archival work conducted across more than fifteen archives in Iceland, Canada, and North Dakota, they reconstructs the experiences of nearly 300 settlers who ventured east—many of whom preferred Nova Scotia or New Brunswick because of the climate’s similarity to Iceland and their expectation of more favourable agricultural land.

Jay’s work follows individuals such as district magistrate and widower Jón Rögnvaldsson, poet Halla Jónsdóttir, farmer Brynjólfur Brynjólfsson, merchant H. C. Robb, and the ambitious Icelandic immigration agent Jóhannes Arngrímsson (John Anderson). The book details not only their migration and settlement attempts but also the complex political landscape surrounding immigration, land policy, and provincial governance in the years following Confederation.

In addition to revising their dissertation into a book-length narrative, Jay will add at least two new chapters for the published monograph. One of these will explore the life and work of J. Magnús Bjarnason, an Icelandic-Canadian author who grew up in Markland and later fictionalized the community’s stories. Another will examine the relationships between Icelanders and the Mi’kmaq at the Beaver Dam reserve, considering how Nova Scotia’s reserve centralization policies intersected with immigration and settlement schemes.

A significant contribution of the project is the detailed appendix of biographies, which offers the first complete list of Icelandic settlers in Nova Scotia and provides genealogical, social, and geographic information of particular interest to descendants. Photographs, maps, land documents, settler letters, government correspondence, and oral histories further enrich the narrative.

With a projected word count of approximately 100,000 words plus appendices, Jay anticipates submitting the completed manuscript to an academic press following their dissertation defense in Spring 2026.

The Canada Iceland Foundation is proud to support this important contribution to Icelandic-Canadian scholarship. Jay’s work not only broadens our national historical understanding but also restores the voices, places, and experiences of a community whose story has long deserved a fuller telling.

Congratulations to Jay Lalonde, 2025 recipient of the Goodman Writers Grant.
We look forward to the publication of Markland and to the new insight it will bring to Icelandic and Canadian history.