I found out about this particular prize in Hansard, as it turns out the finalists for this particular award were visiting the House yesterday. Here’s Conservative MP Andrew Saxton:

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the finalists of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The five finalists are on Parliament Hill today. They are: John English, a former member of this place; Rudyard Griffiths; James Maskalyk; Daniel Poliquin; and Terry Gould, who is from my riding of North Vancouver.

Mr. Gould is an investigative journalist who is being honoured as a finalist for his work, Murder without Borders, which is a portrait of seven journalists who were murdered in the line of duty.

The Shaughnessy Cohen prize is a $25,000 award presented annually by the Writers’ Trust of Canada to the best non-fiction book on Canadian political and social issues. The winner will be announced on Wednesday.

I congratulate all finalists and thank them for their contribution to the understanding of political issues among Canadians.

As you all know, I happen to think that one of the purposes of political blogging is to develop the ability to express oneself, which means a collection of blogposts could make a perfectly readable book. As it happens, I think there are plenty of Blogging Tories who could, if sufficiently motivated, turn their blog into a book. (And 25 grand ain’t bad for a motivator either.) And as it turns out, the Guidelines for this particular prize don’t appear to be all that strenuous; although they ban self-published books, stuff that previously appeared on blogs seems to be alright.

Hence, this poll. We should push for a Blogging Tory to get a book published, and so identify one whose book we think everyone should buy.

Note that there are a couple of names left out. Ezra Levant doesn’t appear, because he already has a good book out (Shakedown) and that’s an unfair advantage. And since I’m the one conducting the poll, in all fairness my name’s not on the list either.

And, for the first time, I’ve enabled a multiple-choice option. You can pick up to three people whom you think should go for it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 07:15 and is filed under Blogging, Blogging Tory Challenges, Can Cons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.