Anna Porter has won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for her book Ghosts of Europe, an examination of democracy in Central Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. She was presented with the $25,000 award at the Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa Wednesday night.

The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe’s Troubled Past and Uncertain Future is published by Douglas & McIntyre. In their citation, the jury — L. Ian MacDonald, Rosemary Speirs and Paul Wells — called Porter “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.”

Porter, who was born in Budapest and moved to Canada in 1970, is among the most important figures in Canadian publishing. She’s the founder of Key Porter Books, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and the author of several books, including Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, winner of the 2007 Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize.

The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing is an annual award that celebrates “a non-fiction book that captures a political subject of interest to Canadian readers and enhances our understanding of the issue.” It is named after Shaughnessy Cohen, the MP from Windsor, Ont., who died in 1998.

Past winners include Daniel Poliquin, Romeo Dallaire and John English, who won last year for Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000.

The other finalists for this year’s prize were Tim Cook for The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie; Shelagh D. Grant for Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America; Lawrence Martin for Harperland: The Politics of Control; and Doug Saunders for Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World. Each author receives $2,500.

National Post