Journalists dominate over historians among the shortlist nominees for the Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political books
- The Two Michaels: Innocent Canadian Captives and High Stakes Espionage in the US-China Cyber War by Mike Blanchfield & Fen Osler Hampson from Sutherland House;
- China Unbound: A New World Disorder by Joanna Chiu from House of Anansi;
- Flora!: A Woman in a Man’s World by Flora MacDonald & Geoffrey Stevens from McGill-Queen's;
- The Next Age of Uncertainty: How the World Can Adapt to a Riskier Future by Stephen Poloz from the PenguinRandom imprint Allen Lane
- "Indian" in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power by Jody Wilson-Raybould from HarperCollins.
Considering yesterday's notes on the state of Canadian writing and publishing, it's worth noting that the two small Canadian presses here have matched the total nominations for the big branchplants (with an academic press giving a made-in-Canada majority).
Indian in the Cabinet impressed me a lot, but it's is the only nominatted book I have read. And the Cohen Prize juries have been unpredictable in their sense of what makes a good "political" book.
