OTTAWA – Calgary journalist Marcello Di Cintio has won this year’s $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his reportage on international barricades.

The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced Di Cintio’s “Walls: Travels Along the Barricades” (Goose Lane Editions) as the recipient of the 13th annual award at Wednesday’s Politics and the Pen Gala in Ottawa.

The book includes personal stories of people living against divisive walls around the world and analyzes how those barriers influence neighbouring cultures.

It was chosen by a jury that included politician and political scientist Ed Broadbent, columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, and novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin.

“Walls: Travels Along the Barricades” also made the long lists for the recently announced British Columbia National Award for Non-Fiction, and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Di Cintio, who has authored two other books and written for various publications, beat out four other finalists who each received $2,500.

They were:

– Taras Grescoe for “Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile.”

– Noah Richler for “What We Talk About When We Talk About War.”

– Jeffrey Simpson for “Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health-Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century.”

– Peter F. Trent for “The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal.”

“As Marcello Di Cintio discovers, walls divide far more than nations,” the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize jury said in a statement.

“In this 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.”

The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing was established in honour of the late MP from Windsor, Ont.

It honours “a non-fiction book that captures a political subject of interest to Canadian readers and enhances our understanding of the issue.”

Last year’s winner was political columnist Richard Gwyn’s “Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867-1891.”