Two weeks after receiving the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing, Maclean’s politics editor Paul Wells has won the 2014 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize for The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006­“ (Random House Canada).

In a press release, the jury praised Wells for his lively, witty and perceptive insider, political portrait of Stephen Harper as a calculating, incremental politician.

Wells was selected for the $10,000 prize from a shortlist of five titles, narrowed down from 40 submissions. The other nominees were:

• Susan Delacourt, Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (Douglas & McIntyre)

• P. Whitney Lackenbauer, The Canadian Rangers: A Living History (University of British Columbia Press)

• David O’Keefe, One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada)

• John L. Riley, The Once and Future Great Lakes Country: An Ecological History (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

The prize is awarded annually to the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year. It honours Canadian newspaper editor John Wesley Dafoe, who worked for the Manitoba Free Press from 1901 to 1944.

Wells will be presented with the award in Winnipeg on May 27.