National Magazine Awards gala is Friday

This Friday, Canadian magazines will win awards. Guaranteed! The 32nd annual National Magazine Awards gala is June 5. I'll be there.*

Earlier we took a look at 4 Middle East-related articles up for awards this year. Should victory transpire, they'll grab a place in history alongside these other recent NMA winners covering the Middle East:

Last year (the 2007 awards) George Jonas won a Gold award in the Essays category for his 7,600-word, um, essay/saga: "Meditations on Israel" published in Queen's Quarterly. I tried to get through it and failed. Obviously the judges fared better. (I've linked to the article on Jonas's personal website; if you can find the original QQ publication, there are some nice accompanying photographs.)

In 2006, Deborah Campbell won a Gold and a Silver award for "Iran's Quiet Revolution" in The Walrus... fantastic piece on the fabric of Iranian society just as the nuclear issue was first heating up (pun intended). The same year, George Jonas (again) won a Gold award for "The Spielberg Massacre" in Maclean's, in which he ripped the director for messing with his book about the Munich tragedy.

In 2005, it was The Walrus again: A photo essay by Rita Leistner, "Al Rashad"--about an Iraqi psychiatric hospital--won a Gold award in the Words & Pictures category (obviously the captions were great). (Unfortunately the above link doesn't call up the entire photo essay, just the intro.) "The Peace Wager" by Kathy Cook, also in The Walrus, won a Silver award for reporting on the Darfur crisis.

And just so you don't think that every award-winning Canadian magazine article about the Middle East has to be either published in The Walrus or by George Jonas (or in English, for that matter), in 2004 the venerable Michel Vastel won a Gold award for "Ma guerre d'Algérie" in L'actualité, ruminating on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Algerian war for independence, in which Michel Vastel fought. [Find out a bit more on this in the latest Ryerson Review of Journalism's profile of Vastel, who died last year.]

See you at the gala.

* I have to be there; it's the perk of my day job.

National Magazine Awards nominations announced

Tonight we found out the nominees for the 32nd annual National Magazine Awards, for which there are 36 categories and 341 total nominees from 79 mags, which gives the impression--I hope true--that this country is flippin' crazy about magazines.*

Among the nominees are at least 4 articles involving Middle East issues:

• "Iraq's Walking Dead" by Chris Watt in Maisonneuve magazine is nominated in the category Investigative Reporting. It's about Iraqi Kurds and a Kurdish prison in northern Iraq. Chris, a student, is also nominated for the Best Student Writer award for this piece.

• "The Prince of Little Mogadishu" by Gerald Hannon in Toronto Life is nominated in the Profiles category. (Hannon is hands-down the best magazine profile writer around this town, for those of you who like profiles, which honestly I don't, but I liked this one.) It's a story of K'naan, a Somali refugee-cum-hip-hop-artist. (Clay Stang, who took the photographs for this piece, also got a nomination in the Portrait Photography category.)

• "York's Middle East War" by Brett Grainger in Toronto Life is nominated in the Society category. I read this article when it first came out and found it a bit sensationalist. But having been involved in campus wars involving Middle East issues for years, my opinion probably matters little here. If you're a Tor Life fan (and really, a magazine's job is to pleasure its readers, not necessarily me), or if unlike me you don't have 20 friends who are grad students at York U, I'm sure you'll find it very insightful.
  
  
• "Liban, les « métiers » du chaos" par Katia Jarjoura dans L'actualité, sur l'équipe de nuit, d'une sorte, au Beyrouth. (Possibly the most interesting article nominated, but it's in French. C'est okay, oui, because all of you are bilingual, non? Like moi, I'm being bilingual maintenant.)
  

Up for grabs for these and hundreds of other articles: Gold and Silver awards at the 32nd annual National Magazine Awards gala on June 5. Stay tuned.

*Full disclosure: Your humble blogger platoons as the Communications Manager for the National Magazine Awards, so this blog posting is probably 49% utterly shameless promotion of the organization he works for and, more to the point, initiates and tracks the media coverage of. But the other 51% is pure, unaffiliated love for Canadian magazines!