Anna Porter wins the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for her book The Ghosts of Europe. (Writers' Trust of Canada)Author and book publisher Anna Porter has won the 2011 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing.

Toronto-based Porter captured the non-fiction literary honour Wednesday night for her latest book, The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe's Troubled Past and Uncertain Future.

She was presented with the $25,000 prize, administered by the Writers Trust of Canada, at the annual Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa.

The jury praised the Hungarian-born Porter for her post-Communism examination of Central Europe.

"In Anna Porter, we are in the presence not only of a journalist on a personal odyssey back to her own origins in Communist Hungary, but of a gifted storyteller who shapes a historically consequential narrative," the three-member panel said in a citation.

In The Ghosts of Europe, Porter demonstrates she is 'a gifted storyteller who shapes a historically consequential narrative,' the jurors said. (Writers' Trust of Canada) The four remaining finalists each receive $2,500. They are:

• Tim Cook, for The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie.
• Shelagh D. Grant, for Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America.
• Lawrence Martin, for Harperland: The Politics of Control.
• Doug Saunders, for Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World.

Established in honour of outspoken former MP Shaughnessy Cohen, who died in 1998, the annual prize celebrates a non-fiction book on a political subject that captures the interest of Canadians and furthers understanding of the issue.

Past winners have included Dr. James Orbinski, former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, Trudeau biographer John English and political scientist Janice Gross Stein (with political insider Eugene Lang).