Maggie Helwig’s Encampment wins 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing

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Maggie Helwig, a rector of St. Stephen’s Anglican Church in Toronto, has won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for her book Encampment: Resistance, Grace and an Unhoused Community, a look at Canada’s homelessness crisis.

Helwig’s win was announced Wednesday night at a gala in Ottawa, and the honour comes with a $40,000 prize. Meanwhile, four shortlisted finalists will each receive $5,000.

But in accepting the award, Ms. Helwig issued a challenge to an audience that included several members of the federal cabinet, among them federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson. Prime Minister Mark Carney was also at the gala, but had left by the time Ms. Helwig was named the winner.

The gala at the Chateau Laurier hotel was co-hosted by Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon. Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe was in attendance as well as scores of journalists, MPs, and business leaders.

“I am cognizant that I am in the kind of room in which I am not very often, and that I have a deep responsibility to bring into this room the voices of my community, who are so rarely given any voice,” Ms. Helwig said.

“Policies of neglect, exclusion and displacement have a body count,” said Ms. Helwig, who spoke of the limits of building policies to build more market rental housing and denounced the closing of safe-injection sites and criminalizing street drug use.

She urged politicians making choices to think of the homeless sleeping outside on a night like Wednesday night when Ottawa was soaked by sustained rain as part of a weather alert.

And she closed by reading the names of more than 20 homeless people she knew who have died in recent years.

This is the 26th year for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize – named for the late MP – sponsored by Canadian National Railway Co. and presented at the Politics and the Pen gala.

The prize is awarded annually to a book of literary nonfiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers and has the potential to shape or influence thinking on Canadian political life.

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Encampment recounts events arising in 2022 when the housing crisis sent some individuals to camp in the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

“A necessary, on-the-ground view of Canada’s homelessness crisis, Encampment succeeds where much of political handwringing and wishful thinking around housing and poverty consistently fail,” said the prize jury in a statement.

“Maggie Helwig never lets compassion impede lucidity, and her book avoids both cynicism and battle fatigue. The result: a clear-eyed call to not look away, but to deepen understanding of the issue. As more and more of our neighbors find themselves living unsheltered, this book is essential reading.”

Jury members were Norma Dunning, a professor at the First Nations University of Canada as well as political columnist and author Chantal Hébert and political journalist and author Paul Wells.

Ms. Helwig was appointed rector of St. Stephen’s Anglican Church in 2015. Before her ordination, she was a writer, editor and arts organizer, and has published 13 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

Encampment previously won the 2025 Toronto Book Award.

The finalists for 2026 were:

• On Oil by Don Gilmor, published by Biblioasis.
• On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent by Brian Stewart, published by Simon & Schuster Canada.
• On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy by Ira Wells, published by Biblioasis.
• Women Who Woke up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada by Karin Wells, published by Second Story Press.