Maggie Helwig (Sandro Pehar)

Maggie Helwig has won the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

The annual $40,000 prize, administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, recognizes literary nonfiction about a political subject that is relevant to Canadian readers. The winner was announced at the Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa on April 29.

Helwig was one of five writers on the independent-press-dominated shortlist for the award announced last month. She was named the winner for her book Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (Coach House Books).

Helwig is the rector at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, an Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood, and is the author of several books of fiction and poetry. In Encampment, Helwig shares an account of the community of people with no other options who erected tents next to her church so they would have a place to live.

In their citation, a jury comprised of past winners Norma Dunning, Chantal Hébert, and Paul Wells called the book “a necessary, on-the-ground view of Canada’s homelessness crisis.”

“Maggie Helwig never lets compassion impede lucidity, and her book avoids both cynicism and battle fatigue. The result: a clear-eyed call to not look away, but to deepen understanding of the issue,” the jury wrote. “As more and more of our neighbours find themselves living unsheltered, this book is essential reading.”

The jury read 51 books submitted by 33 publishing imprints to select the finalists.

This is not the first award for Encampment: the book won the 2025 Toronto Book Award in October.