Barry Gough's book Juan de Fuca's Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams (Harbour Publishing, $32.95) has been shortlisted for the Lela Common Award for Canadian History as part of the 2013 Canadian Authors Association Literary Awards.

In Juan de Fuca's Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams, Barry Gough expertly connects the story of Michael Lok and Juan de Fuca to personalities like Francis Drake, his imitator Thomas Cavendish, the cosmologist and mystic Dr. John Dee, the familiar James Cook and George Vancouver, privateer turned gold-seeker Martin Frobisher, and even that famed patron of seaborne trade and incipient empire, Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess. Gough shares their stories of intrigue and deception, the falsification of evidence and the burying of secrets. Some of these characters pursued a nobler calling of science and surveying, while others showed their ambitious spirit, planting flag-markers and carving an empire in the region's last unclaimed plots. With the help of detailed black and white maps and illustrations, Juan de Fuca's Strait follows their pursuit of discovery.

Dr. Barry Gough is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of King's College London and a Life member of the Association of Canadian Studies, and has been awarded a Doctor of Letters for distinguished contributions to Imperial and Commonwealth history. He is the author of many critically acclaimed books including Fortune's a River (Harbour Publishing, 2007), which won the John Lyman Book Award for best Canadian naval and maritime history and was shortlisted for the Nereus Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Gough has been called the "foremost expositor of BC nautical history"; and has been writing about the history of the Pacific Coast for almost four decades. He lives in Victoria, BC.