WE THE JURY

BEHIND THE SHAUGHNESSY COHEN PRIZE SCENE

So you say you want to be a literary prize juror. Well, buddy, let me tell you... Actually, nobody has yet asked me what it is like to be a literary prize juror, but when I agreed to do the job last year, I thought “I can definitely get a column out of this.”

Last week, the Writers’ Trust of Canada gave the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing to Ryerson journalism professor Kamal Al- Solaylee for his groundbreaking book Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means ( To Everyone). The prize jurors, who defiantly refused to be discouraged by Brown’s cumbersome subtitle because every non-fiction book now has one, were the CBC’s Nahlah Ayed, ex- MP Megan Leslie, and the National Post’s me.

If you’re like me, literary prizes have always been something of a mystery to you. Now that I have been directly involved with one, it is scarcely any less of a mystery. My role in the prize did not involve leaving the house, except for the times I missed a courier lugging 40 pounds of books to the door of my building and had to go retrieve them myself. I have no insight into how the jury was chosen. I didn’t know either of my fellow jurors beforehand, and we never had to meet in person. ( Having now worked with them, if you told me that tomorrow I had to cook a meal or pour a building foundation with them, I would be excited and confident.)

Obviously, when t he Writers’ Trust approached me, I immediately became convinced of its genius. Of COURSE a big literary prize should be judged with the help of a writer who has a national profile and blabs about politics sometimes, but who lives in Outer Canada and is not involved in the Toronto book world — especially socially. This is work I, as a near-recluse, was born to do! Honestly, what took so long?

Naturally this is still how I feel about it, but the feelings are tinged with the suspicion that my outsider status made me something of a soft touch. Being on the Cohen Prize jury involves scrutinizing — well, I have resisted calculating the exact number of books still crowding my home, still emitting a fading, insistent after- funk of obligation. It must be something like 70 or 80, but my fingers just want to write “A million. It was exactly one million books.”

The problem, and this came as a modest surprise, is not that most of the books are bad. When someone gives you the explicit responsibility for subjecting political books to a fair hearing — with one eye kept anxiously on the need to produce a five- book shortlist — you start to notice that even the badly written ones are useful. A country needs a political literature, considered as a sheer mass: it needs a certain quantity of workmanlike, uninspiring books on obscure or technical topics. This is something you may not consider until you accidentally invite a 12- month slice of that literature to pile up in your house and threaten to collapse on your cat.

Some publishers who submitted books for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize tried to sneak through tarted- up doctoral theses, slightly hasty bios, or journo- instabooks. If you’re a newspaperman who doesn’t want to write a book himself — who is so averse to the idea that when it is raised, he feels like a closeted gay man being pestered for grandchildren by relatives — you cannot help looking at these works with sympathy, even pity. If I had to identify the 50th best book in the pile, I would probably find myself saying “Eh, you never know, I might need to refer to this myself one day.” (“Refer to,” for a columnist, means “steal from.”)

In the end, looking for the books in the pile that one might read solely for pleasure was a powerful heuristic. For me, and I do not speak for my fellow jurors here, it was almost enough to produce a top five on its own. If I can address the book- buying public as an individual, I would like to emphasize that this is an important characteristic of Al-Solaylee’s Brown. It already enjoys a high critical reputation, and it is perfectly matched to its historic moment. But you may, particularly if you’re a white reader, hear a voice in your hindbrain saying “Oh, a book about race? I’ll save the 30 bucks and just punch myself in the face.”

No no no. Brown is just a good book — intimate, learned, genial, clever. That’s all: it’s a good book that will last a while. It is probably an important book, too, but I want you to know you can go ahead and overlook the nutritional value.

I would also like to say a word in favour of two books whose authors did not, after all, get the price of a Ford Escape out of the process. The prize jury shortlisted The Vimy Trap or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift. This book is an angry, radical, but rigorous and overdue act of debunking by two professional historians. While I am happy recommending Brown to the public, The Vimy Trap is more of an object I would like to physically throw at some people’s heads.

I also developed a special fondness for James McLeod’s Turmoil, as Usual: Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Road to the 2015 Election. ( Like I was saying before about subtitles...) Turmoil is the memoir of a political beat reporter’s work in the face of a still- unbelievable hurricane of absurdity: I liked it because that sort of work is familiar to me, and yet I found myself saying “Holy cow, did that actually happen?” at every other page. If you happen by any of these three books on the shelf, have a look. You may not agree with my judgment, but, man, I put in the hours.

THIS IS WORK I, AS A NEAR-RECLUSE, WAS BORN TO DO! WHAT TOOK SO LONG?