Chris Benjamin, 2013 Book Award Winner

Winners

Nov 7

Chris Benjamin is a Halifax freelance writer who has worked in Indonesia, Toronto and Ghana. In Ghana he worked as a full-time journalist writing about the financially challenged nation's efforts to improve healthcare, justice, transportation, education and housing.

His first novel, Drive-by Saviours was short-listed for both Canada Reads and a ReLit Award and won the H.R. Percy Prize. His first non-fiction book, Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada (Nimbus, 2011) won the APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and was a finalist for the Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction Prize.

The winning chapter titled Creation Story is from his book The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, published by Nimbus Publishing in 2014. It is the story of how the only residential school in Atlantic Canada came to be. Despite testimony from the churches and state, for the Truth & Reconciliation Commission regarding previous efforts to eradicate indigenous culture via the residential school system, the institutional histories of individual schools tend to remain shadowed.

Chris now writes news features for magazines and narrative research reports for NGOs. He has written for The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and many other magazines.

chrisbenjaminwriting.com
@benjaminwrites
Nimbus Publishing book available here

Past Winners

Marcello DiCintio, 2024 Book Award Winner

Calgary writer Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize), Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense (another Calgary Book Prize winner) and, most recently, Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers.

Vince Beiser, 2023 Book Award Winner

Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author of “The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization.” The book has been translated into five languages, was a finalist for a PEN America award and a California Book Award, and spawned a TED talk.

Carly Lewis, 2023 Magazine Winner

Carly Lewis has been a freelance journalist since 2012. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, Wired, the Globe and Mail, New York Magazine, Elle, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Atlantic, Hazlitt, The Guardian and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor.

Arno Kopecky, 2022 Magazine Award Winner

Arno has been a full time freelance journalist and author for over fifteen years. After graduating from the University of Victoria in 2001 with a double major in Creative Writing and Environmental Studies, he spent two years in Spain teaching English and studying Spanish.

Bonny Reichert, 2022 Book Award Winner

A National Magazine Award-winning journalist. Bonny began her career as an editor at Today’s Parent, Canadian’s largest parenting magazine, moving up in seniority before switching to Chatelaine with a then-readership of 3.1 million.

Eva Holland, 2021 Magazine Award Winner

Eva has been a full time freelancer for the past fourteen years. Much of her work focuses on the environment, especially the intersection of wilderness and society.

Josiah Neufeld, 2021 Book and 2014 Magazine Award

Josiah Neufeld grew up in Burkina Faso the son of evangelical Christian missionaries. Alarmed and awakened to the ecological crisis humanity faces, Josiah journeys on a quest for a spirituality that he hopes will transcend the religious binaries of his childhood faith and rise to meet the crisis of his time.

Alex Roslin, 2020 Magazine Award Co-Winner

Alex Roslin is a journalist based in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. He has focused on social justice and investigative reporting for nearly 30 years.

Francesca Bianco, 2020 Magazine Award Co-Winner

Francesca Bianco was raised in Smithers, British Columbia, graduated from McGill University in English literature, and completed her master’s degree in journalism at the University of British Columbia in 2018.

Roberta Staley, 2019 Book Award Winner

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based, independent magazine editor, writer, columnist, documentary filmmaker and author. Voice of Rebellion – How Mozhdah Jamalzadah Brought Hope to Afghanistan is her first book.

Chris Benjamin

Shirley Dunn

Chris Benjamin, 2013 Book Award Winner

Arno Kopecky, 2015 Magazine Award Winner

Paul Webster, 2013 Magazine Award Winner

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