Scott Shane Wins the 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize for Objective Troy

TORONTO and WASHINGTON, Mar. 1, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Sara Charney, Chair of the Lionel Gelber Prize Board and niece of the late Lionel Gelber, today announced that the winner of the 26th annual Lionel Gelber Prize is Scott Shane for Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone published by Tim Duggan Books.

"Shane's masterpiece is a rarity among foreign affairs books, flowing dramatically like a novel, carrying the academic weight of a thesis, and laying out enough policy dilemmas to fill a month of Sunday talk shows. The story of Anwar al-Awlaki is, in some ways, the story of Americans and Arabs in the age of terror, brought into sharp relief by the Obama administration and its unpredicted—and unpredictable—drone policy, which has redefined the meaning of war and reset its price."

—The 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize Jury

Scott Shane will accept his award and give a free public lecture at the Campbell Conference Facility, at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, on Tuesday, March 29, 2016.

The jury chose the book from a shortlist of five titles, which also included Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses—and Misuses—of History, by Barry Eichengreen; Kissinger: 1923 – 1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson; The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I & Revolution, by Dominic Lieven; and The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, by Susan Pedersen.

Jury Chair John Stackhouse (Toronto, Canada); Michael Barnett (Washington, D.C.); Rachel Lomax (London, England); David M. Malone (Tokyo, Japan); and Matias Spektor (Sao Paulo, Brazil) comprise the 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize jury.

About the Winner: Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he has covered national security since 2004. He has written on recruiting by the Islamic State; the debate over drones and targeted killing; the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden's leaked documents; WikiLeaks and confidential State Department cables; and the Obama administration's prosecution of leaks of classified information, including a lengthy profile of John Kiriakou, the first C.I.A. officer to be imprisoned for leaking. During the Bush administration, he wrote widely on the debate over torture, and his 2007 articles on interrogation, written with colleagues, were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he was reporter for The Baltimore Sun and its Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991. The Los Angeles Times described Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, his book on the Soviet collapse, as "one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union." His series on a public health project in Nepal won the nation's top science-writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. Scott Shane lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife, Francie Weeks, who teaches English to foreign students. They have three children.

About the Book: Based on years of reporting, Scott Shane's winning book is a brilliant reckoning with the moral challenge of terrorism and a masterful chronicle of our times. It tells the gripping and unsettling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the once-celebrated American imam who called for moderation after 9/11 but ultimately directed his outsize talents to the mass murder of his fellow citizens, and follows Barack Obama's campaign against the excesses of the Bush counterterrorism programs and his eventual embrace of the targeted killing of suspected militants. And it recounts how the president directed the mammoth machinery of spy agencies to hunt Awlaki down in a frantic pursuit that would end with a missile fired using the robotic technology that has changed warfare—the drone. Shane weaves the clash between president and terrorist into both a riveting narrative and a deeply human account of the defining conflict of our era.

About the Prize: A literary award for the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues, the Lionel Gelber Prize was founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber. The award is presented annually by The Lionel Gelber Foundation, in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs. A cash prize of $15,000 is awarded to the winner.Two thousand and sixteen marks the 26th anniversary of the Prize.

SOURCE The Lionel Gelber Prize