From our friends at the Writers' Trust of Canada:
Anna Porter — well-known publishing figure, author, journalist and Officer of the Order of Canada — has won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for her book The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe’s Troubled Past and Uncertain Future, published by Douglas & McIntyre. The winner was announced on Wednesday night at the Politics and the Pen Gala in Ottawa.
A jury composed of journalists L. Ian MacDonald, Rosemary Speirs and Paul Wells selected Anna Porter's book from a distinguished shortlist. Their citation reads:
From the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, the former Warsaw Pact states of Central Europe re-gained their independence from Moscow. In Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, newly liberated voices became the sentinels of nascent democracies. Even under the Soviet yoke, these countries never lost their nationhood, but two decades later still struggle “under the weight of history and memory.” In Anna Porter, we are in the presence not only of a journalist on a personal odyssey back to her own origins in Communist Hungary, but of a gifted storyteller who shapes a historically consequential narrative.
For a list of the finalists and for more information about the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, please visit the Writers' Trust of Canada website.
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