Naomi Klein is a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate.Tim Fraser/The Globe and Mail
The finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, were announced on Tuesday.
The nominees for the $25,000 prize, awarded every year 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," are Joseph Heath for Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives; Chantal Hébert and Jean Lapierre for The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was; Naomi Klein for This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate; John Ralston Saul for The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power and Influence; and Graham Steele for What I Learned About Politics: Inside the Rise – and Collapse – of Nova Scotia's NDP Government.
Hébert is also a finalist for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the winner of which will be announced next month, while Klein won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction last October.
The finalists were chosen by a jury consisting of Ottawa author Denise Chong, Ottawa Citizen columnist Terry Glavin, and Jane Taber, and the Globe and Mail's Atlantic bureau chief.
The winner will be announced at the Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa on March 11.
The prize was established in honour of Shaughnessy Cohen, a Windsor MP who died in 1998.
Mark Medley