Blatchford wins!

Huzzah!

In the case of Blatchford's Fifteen Days, all summer I kept telling myself: No, this book can't be that good, you like it so much because of your own notorious preoccupation with the cause of Afghan liberation, your fellow jurors will give you a withering look and you'll feel like an eejit for putting it on your shortlist.

I didn't trust my own judgment.

But, as it turned out, my fellow jurors Chantel Hebert and Marian Botsford Fraser turned out to have been similarly haunted by the power and grace of Blatchford's work. They were at least as enthusiastic as I was, and perhaps as surprised by how moving, how elegant and engrossing, a book like this could be. Fifteen Days is nothing like the fashionably detached and cynical high-brow stuff that so often passes for journalism about Canada's military mission in Afghanistan (Chris Wattie's Contact Charlie being a fine and notable exception).

God, I'm happy for her. Well done, Christie!