Having Majored in Politics and spent some years as a professional public interest lobbyist and university researcher, Tragic follows book awards which honour political and public interest issues closely. The winners are generally works of gravitas produced by those with front line experience, shrewd political nous, courage and generally well-developed research skills.
Last week James Orbinskias won Canada's leading political literature award, the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century (Doubleday Canada). The book was also a finalist for the 2008 Governor General's Literary Awards.
A volunteer and past president with Médecins Sans Frontièrs (Doctors Without Borders), Orbinski chronicles his frontline humanitarian work in international hotspots – a cholera epidemic in Peru, famine in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda. An Imperfect Offering finds unimaginable acts of hope, courage, and empathy in some of the darkest places of our history.
"James Orbinski takes us to a different world - where human beings attacked, mutilated, raped, tortured, dismembered and murdered their fellow citizens," Shaughnessy Cohen Prize jury members Chantal Hebert, William Johnson and David Walmsley wrote in a release.
The other finalists who each received $3,500 were:
Vancouver's Daphne Bramham, The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect, Random House Canada
Erna Paris of Toronto, The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America, Knopf Canada.
Marie Wadden of St. John's, N.L Where the Pavement Ends: Canada’s Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation , Douglas & McIntyre
Chris Wood of Duncan, B.C. for Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America ,Raincoast Books
About the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
Established in honour of the late, outspoken, and popular MP, the prize is administered by The Writers' Trust of Canada and sponsored by CTVglobemedia. It is presented for a non-fiction book that captures a subject of political interest to the Canadian reader and enhances our understanding of the issue.
The winning work needs to combine compelling new insights with depth of research and be of significant literary merit. Strong consideration is will be given to books that, in the opinion of the jury, have the potential to shape or influence Canadian political life. The prize is presented at Politics and the Pen in Ottawa in the spring.
Tragic maintains a summary page about the prize. at CanlitAwards.com.
The Bancroft Prizes are awarded annually by Columbia University in the City of New York. Under the terms of the will of the late Fredric Bancroft, provision is made for two annual prizes of equal rank to be awarded to the authors of distinguished works in either or both of the following categories: American History (including biography) and Diplomacy.
2008 Winners:
The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America by Allan M. Brandt, published by Basic Books;
The Populist Vision by Charles Postal, published by Oxford University Press
Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, by Peter Silver,published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.
The purpose of the Goldsmith Book Prize is to recognise works that "improve government through an examination of the intersection between press, politics, and public policy." The prize is awarded to the book published in the previous year that best exemplifies the fulfillment of this goal. The first such prize was awarded in 1993.
The 2008 Goldsmith prize in the Academic category was won by John G. Geer's. In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns and in Trade Ted Gup's , Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life
The Ambassador Book Award is awarded annually by the English Speaking Union. It recognizes important literary works that contribute to the understanding and interpretation of American life and culture. Winners of the award are considered literary ambassadors who provide, in the best contemporary English, an important window on America to the rest of the world. A panel of judges, currently chaired by author Maureen Howard, selects books out of new works in the fields of fiction, biography, autobiography, current affairs, American studies and poetry. 2008 Winners:
American Studies: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics; Rebecca Solnit (University of California Press) Autobiography: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties;Robert Stone (HarperCollins Publishers) Biography: Edith Wharton; Hermione Lee (Alfred A. Knopf) Fiction: The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Mohsin Hamid (Harcourt, Inc.) Poetry: Blackbird and Wolf; Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are an American literary award dedicated to honoring written works that make important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture. Established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf and originally administered by the Saturday Review, the awards have been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since 1963.
2008 winners:
Junot Diaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Orwell Prize is the pre-eminent British prize for political writing. There are two annual awards: a Book Prize and a Journalism Prize. They are awarded to the book, and for the journalism, which is judged to have best achieved George Orwell’s aim to ‘make political writing into an art’. Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Orwell’s incomparable essays still resonate around the world as peerless examples of courageous independence of mind, steely analysis and beautiful writing.The 2008 Orwell was won by Raja Shehadeh – Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape in which he navigates recent Palestinian history by walking from Ayn Kenya to the Shukba Caves, the Ramallah hills and the Dead Sea.
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah. He is a founder of the human rights organisation, Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and the author of several books about international law, human rights and the Middle East.
artwork above by Tragic' alter ego Kev Parker
by Ellen Jackson; photographed and illustrated by Nic Bishop, also sounds intriguing. Tragic has a particular interest in Black Holes since his Superannuation savings disappeared into one.
Just for fun Tragic went back and had a look at the winning book covers since the awards first year, 1973. It is lovely how many are still in print, including the very first winner 
, by Steve Watkins Candlewick Press 
, by Pamela S. Turner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
, by Bonny Becker, illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton
Candlewick Press
, Illustrated and written by Hyewon Yum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
, by Mary E. Pearson
Henry Holt Books for Young Readers
, by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Sean Qualls
Henry Holt Books for Young Readers
Illustrated and written by Mo Willems, Hyperion
