Rogers Writers Trust Award

I met James Fitzgerald in 1989. He was the special reports editor and a feature writer for Strategy, a trade publication, and I was a beat reporter. He was - and is - a wry, dry, witty man and although our paths diverged in '97 (I was fired) we've never lost contact entirely. So I was enormously pleased for him when I read earlier today that his second book, What Disturbs Our Blood, has just won the Rogers Writers Trust Award for non-fiction. Perhaps now his first book, Old Boys, an oral history of Upper Canada College published in 1994 - which caused ructions at the school and beyond - will get a reappraisal and perhaps a reprint. After all, Michael Ignatieff and Conrad Black are both in it, and my haven't their fortunes changed.

Still with the Rogers award, further congratulations to Emma Donogue, who won for her novel Room. I came across her writing for the first time several years ago when I read a short story of hers about two women who created a stone monument on Hogtown's Lakeshore Boulevard and was based, if memory serves, on a couple of women who did that very thing about the time of the First World War. Skip forward to 2008 and I'm pleased to say the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, where I was handling publicity, accepted my suggestion that Emma read at our summer event at the Jewish Community Centre on Spadina Avenue. Read she did - new baby in tow and all - for a lousy $25. A classy, talented woman. I wish her - and James Fitzgerald - the best and look forward to their next books.