The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced at the Politics and the Pen Gala that Marcello Di Cintio is the winner of 2013’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (Goose Lane Editions). Marcello Di Cintio will receive a $25,000 prize. The jury, composed of politician and political scientist Ed Broadbent, National Post and iPolitics.ca columnist Tasha Kheiriddin and novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin, selected the winner, praising Marcello’s ability to bring the personal stories of people living against walls around the world to life.
Now in its 13th year, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize was originally established to honour an outspoken member of Parliament from Windsor, Ontario, who died on December 9, 1998. The prize is awarded annually to a non-fiction book that engages Canadians and provides new insights into a topic or issue.
The four remaining nominees will receive a $2,500 prize. They are:
Taras Grescoe for Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile (HarperCollins)
Noah Richler for What We Talk About When We Talk About War (Goose Lane Editions)
Jeffrey Simpson for Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health-Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century (Allen Lane Canada)
Peter F. Trent for The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
The Politics and the Pen Gala is an annual fundraising event for Writers’ Trust of Canada, held in Ottawa each year. To date, they have raised more than $2 million to support Writers’ Trust’s goal of advancing, nurturing and celebrating Canadian writers through literary awards, financial grants, scholarships and writer’s retreats.
Marcello Di Cintio joins a list of winners that include Anna Porter, Roméo Dallaire and Richard Gwyn.
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