Author John English at the Munk Centre in May, 2009.
University of Waterloo history professor and former Liberal MP John English has won the 2009-2010 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for excellence in political writing for the second volume of his acclaimed, best-selling biography of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
English, 65, received the $25,000 award Wednesday night at the annual "Politics and the Pen" benefit in Ottawa for the Writers' Trust of Canada. His book, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000, prevailed over four other finalists, each of whom received $2,500 as runners-up. In its citation, the three-person jury lauded English for "deepening our understanding of the private as well as the public life of [Trudeau] [His work]sets a new literary standard for Canadian political biography."
Just Watch Me had earlier been nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, also worth $25,000, but lost to The Boy in the Moon by Globe and Mail feature writer Ian Brown.
Other finalists for the Cohen Prize, named after a Liberal MP from Windsor, Ont., who died in 1998, were Terry Gould's Murder without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World's Most Dangerous Places; Rudyard Griffiths's Who We Are: A Canadian Citizen's Manifesto; Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village by James Maskalyk; and Daniel Poliquin's René Lévesque.