The Writers’ Trust of Canada has named Marcello Di Cintio’s Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (Goose Lane Editions) the winner of this year’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Di Cintio received the $25,000 prize at the annual Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa on Wednesday night.

The jury ” former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, National Post and iPolitics.ca columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, and novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin ” describe Di Cintio’s book as “beautifully written reportage.”

“The author brings readers the personal stories “ gripping, haunting, humorous, and inspiring “ of people living against walls around the world, from the ‘peaceline’ of Belfast to the l’Acadie fence of Montreal.”

Walls beat out Taras Grescoe’s Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile (HarperCollins Canada); Noah Richler’s What We Talk About When We Talk About War (Goose Lane Editions); Jeffrey Simpson’s Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health-Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century (Allen Lane Canada); and Peter F. Trent’s The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal (McGill-Queen’s University Press). Each of the four finalists received $2,500.