Charles Oberdorf to be honoured for outstanding achievement at Magawards

Charles Oberdorf, a friend and colleague for many years, has been named the recipient of this year's Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement at the National Magazine Awards. I was pleased to be one of the supporters of his nomination. The award is well-deserved not only for his teaching and mentorship (he is coordinator of the Magazine Publishing program at the Chang School for Continuing Education at Ryerson University) but also for a long and distinguished career as a stylish magazine writer and editor. You run out of fingers tallying up the magazines he has written for or where he's been an editor.

This year's nominees for the Magawards, chosen from among more than 2,100 individual entries nationwide, were announced at a special reception at Restaurant Wilson in Montreal on Tuesday evening. The complete list of nominees can be found here.

Once again, The Walrus had the most nominations (37), followed by Toronto Life (29), Maclean's (18), Report on Business (16), L’actualité (15), Explore (14), Québec science (9) and Canadian Business (8).

[One of The Walrus nominees , in the short feature category, is the late June Callwood for her article "Forgiveness".]

The three finalists for the coveted Magazine of the Year award are L’actualité, Maisonneuve and Toronto Life.

The winner of this year’s award for Best New Magazine Writer is Patrick White, for an article entitled “Red Rush” that appeared in The Walrus (April 2007). The same article is also nominated for an award in the category Science, Technology & the Environment.

The NMAF’s third annual award for Best Student Writer goes to Julia Belluz for her article “I” that appeared in the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Julia's article is also nominated in the Profiles category. Honourable Mention goes to Dan Yates and Meena Nallainathan.

Individually, writers John Lorinc, Ray Ford, Duncan Hood and Tabatha Southey received 3 nominations each. Photographers Benoit Aquin, Mario Miotti and Liam Sharp, and Illustrators Sam Weber, Graham Roumieu and Christian Northeast, each received at least 2 nominations.

In addition to the usual suspects mentioned above, it was good to see several new faces from new magazines and names and multiple nominees from smaller magazines , notably:

• Tor Lukasik-Foss in the columns category for his work in Hamilton Magazine*
• Stuart Ross, also in columns, from Sub-Terrain*
• In editorial package, the teams from Spacing and Unlimited (which is not a year old)
• Two nominees in fiction from The New Quarterly (Annabel Lyon and Kathleen Winter)
• Several nominations for Taddle Creek, in fiction (Cary Fagan), poetry (Katia Grubisic) and words and pictures (Michael Cho and Conan Tobias)
  
• In art direction for an entire issue, Malcolm Brown for Unlimited and
  
• In portrait photography, Liam Sharp in Precedent, from the magazine's first issue

*disclosure: I was one of the judges in this category