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OTTAWA - John English of Kitchener, Ont., has won the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his latest biography on Pierre Trudeau.
The former MP and history professor at the University of Waterloo nabbed the prize Wednesday night at the Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa.
English was honoured for his book "Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000," published by Knopf Canada.
Jury members said English "deepens our understanding" of Trudeau by accessing mining hard-to-access materials for the book.
"'Just Watch Me' sets a new literary standard for Canadian political biography," jurors Andrew Nikiforuk, Erna Paris and Michael Petrou wrote in a release.
English was nominated for the same prize in 2006 for his book "Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1919-1968."
He also authored a two-volume biography of Lester Pearson.
The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, established in honour of the late MP from Windsor, Ont., is awarded annually to a non-fiction book about a political subject of interest to Canadian readers.
The other four finalists for this year's prize receive $2,500 each.
They are:
-Vancouver's Terry Gould for "Murder Without Borders: Dying For the Story in the World's Most Dangerous Places"
-Rudyard Griffiths of Toronto for "Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto"
-James Maskalyk of Toronto for "Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village"
-Ottawa's Daniel Poliquin for "Rene Levesque"
The Politics and the Pen gala is an annual benefit for the Writers' Trust of Canada.
