Vanderhaeghe among latest Trudeau fellows

Award-winning author Guy Vanderhaeghe is among the handful of academics named winners of the $225,000 Trudeau Fellowships on Tuesday.

"I was enormously delighted and terribly surprised," the Saskatoon-based writer told CBC News in an interview broadcast Tuesday morning.

"The fellowship is not something that you can apply for, so I had no idea that I was even in the running. So it was just very strange to get a phone call out of the blue saying to me that I was under consideration for the prize and then again to have another phone call confirming it."

The fellowship is awarded for a three-year period and offers $150,000 as well as a travel and research allowance of $75,000.

The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation chooses individuals who "continue to question society's world views and teach the importance of responsible and engaged citizenship."

The recipients "have proven that they can imagine and promote new solutions to contemporary issues of importance to all Canadians, relying on the knowledge they draw from the conscientious attention they pay to the needs of our society," foundation president P.G. Forest said in a statement.

Other winners include:

• University of Montreal professor François Crépeau, an expert in the field of international human rights, international migration law and globalization.
• University of Calgary professor Kathleen Mahoney, an expert in human rights, constitutional law and women's rights, distinguished for her work on the historic settlement agreement between the government of Canada and aboriginal residential school survivors.
• University of British Columbia professor John B. Robinson, an expert in sustainability and climate change, as well as co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
• University of Toronto professor, award-winning biographer and poet Rosemary Sullivan.

Vanderhaeghe, who teaches at the University of Saskatchewan, said he will use the fellowship funds — the largest financial prize he has ever received — to support himself and his research as he works on a new book.

"A long time ago I shot my mouth off and said that I was gonna do a trilogy about Western Canada, basically in a period that I thought was very important for the development of the West," he said.

"The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing were the two works, and I'm now working on the third. I'm still working my way through what that book is about."