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Release Date: March 22, 2005

Headline: Raincoast author, Rex Weyler (Greenpeace), shortlisted for prestigious literary award

Press Release: Vancouver, Toronto (March 22, 2005) -- Raincoast is proud to announce that Rex Weyler’s book Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World has been shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The $15,000 prize, administered by the Writer’s Trust of Canada, will be presented at the Politics and the Pen event on April 13th in Ottawa.

The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize is presented annually to a non-fiction book that, in the opinion of the jurors, exhibits outstanding literary merit and enlarges our understanding of contemporary Canadian political and social issues. This year’s jury, made up of Senator Pat Carney, writer and professor Andrew Cohen and writer Marci MacDonald called Greenpeace “an environmental thriller about the motley crew of Canadians in a fishboat whose efforts to save the whales helped launched a worldwide ecology movement.”

Greenpeace is the definitive record of the founding and development of one of the world’s most successful activist organizations. Using a combination of his own experience on Greenpeace’s early voyages, extensive research and the archives of the organization’s founders, Pulitzer-Prize nominee Rex Weyler has given Canadians a fascinating snapshot of an important part of their shared history. With a historian’s insight and a novelist’s style, Weyler tells the complete story of what it’s like to start a revolution. Greenpeace was released simultaneously in several countries — Canada, the U.S, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand — in the fall of 2004 to wide critical acclaim.

Rex Weyler is one of the founders of Greenpeace International and was a photographer on many of Greenpeace’s most notable early activist voyages. He is author of numerous books, including Blood of the Land, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize nomination. He is also a co-founder of the Hollyhock Educational Centre in British Columbia. Greenpeace, his thorough and honest history of Greenpeace’s founding and first decade in Vancouver, was published in Canada by Raincoast Books. Weyler lives with his family in Vancouver.

Visit www.raincoast.com/greenpeace for excerpts of the book, photos and more about Rex Weyler.

Greenpeace by Rex Weyler is joined by equally stellar nominees:

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Random House)
Gwynn Dwyer, Future: Tense (McClelland and Stewart)
JL Granastein, Who Killed the Canadian Military (HarperFlamingo)
Jennifer Welsh, At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century (HarperCollins)

For more information, or to schedule an interview with Rex Weyler, please contact:

David Leonard
Senior Publicist
Raincoast Books
david {at} raincoast dot com
416 934 9903

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The Writers’ Trust is committed to exploring and introducing to future generations the traditions that will enrich our common literary heritage and strengthen Canada’s cultural foundations. www.writerstrust.com.

Raincoast Books is a Canadian publisher and distributor based in Vancouver, BC.

Raincoast Publishing, which includes the Polestar imprint and key titles from Press Gang Publishers, produces a wide range of fiction and non-fiction titles for adults and children. Raincoast Distribution is the exclusive Canadian distributor for publishers from the U.K., the U.S. and Canada. Visit www.raincoast.com for more information.