John Macfarlane to receive National Magazine Award for Outstanding Achievement

The Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement has been one of the outstanding achievements of the National Magazine Awards. It is an opportunity to highlight people who have made a real difference in this business and it has created an enviable and hard-to-join club. Entering that select group this year is John Macfarlane, the Editor of Toronto Life and Vice-President of Strategic Development at St. Joseph Media.

Macfarlane has twice been editor of Toronto Life: since 1992; and from 1972 to 1974. Under his editorial direction,Toronto Life has won more than 70 National Magazine Awards. He's been publisher of Saturday Night and of the Financial Times of Canada, Editor of Weekend magazine and an editor at Maclean's. He served as President of the National Magazine Awards. He is being honoured for what writer Robert Fulford calls "his unrelenting pressure for excellence and his shaping vision of what a good magazine can be."

The Foundation's inaugural Best Student Writer Award goes to Leigh Doyle for her article So Long that appeared in The Ryerson Review of Journalism. Leigh is a recent journalism graduate from Ryerson University and former editor of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

The winner of this year's Alexander Ross Award for Best New Writer is Larry Frolick, for his articles The Wired Cabin in Outpost and Danger Signs in The Walrus. Larry Frolick is the author of Splitting Up: Divorce, Culture, and the Search for a Real Life, Ten Thousand Scorpions, and Grand Centaur Station. He lives in Toronto.

All National Magazine Awards, including the President's Medal for overall excellence (popularly called Magazine of the Year), will be presented June 9th, 2006 at the Carlu in Toronto.