Ottawa, June 14, 2003—The co-winners of the 2002 Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence are Susan Goldberg and David Peebles, both of Toronto. Goldberg received the award for her work on Misinformed Consent: Thirteen Women Share Their Stories about Unnecessary Hysterectomy, and Peebles for McGraw-Hill Ryerson Mathematics of Data Management.
The $2,000 award was presented during a gala banquet during EAC’s annual conference, held in Ottawa this year.
Nominations for the 2002 Tom Fairley Award were up sharply over previous years. The judges had to make their choice from a number of outstanding submissions.
According to the judges, Susan Goldberg “worked with the women to restore their individual voices. In doing so she displayed tremendous sensitivity to women traumatized by medical calamity. She conducted a substantial amount of research on her own to help her make the medical issues involved accessible to a lay readership.”
David Peebles’s award-winning project “also had multiple authors but his task was to make one voice of many. He organized and clarified a mass of complex mathematical material to shape it into a student-friendly text that met the new curricular requirements. He displayed remarkable attention to detail while retaining a firm grasp of the whole, and a sure-footedness with every phase of production,” the judges wrote.
Susan Goldberg writes and edits newspaper articles, reports, newsletters, Web materials, brochures, poems and short stories. David Peebles came to editing from a background in science, theatrical lighting and electrical wiring.
The judges for this year’s prize were Camilla Jenkins, Olive Koyama and Shaun Oakey, all experienced editors and EAC members.
Camilla Jenkins won the Tom Fairley Award last year for her work on Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s by Alexandra Palmer, published by UBC Press. Although an in-house editor at UBC Press, Camilla works at her home in Toronto.
Olive Koyama has worked both in-house (Oxford) and freelance. She is one of the mainstays of the Toronto branch, having held most executive positions including branch chair. She was also the editor of the EAC newsletter.
Shaun Oakey freelances on a variety of subjects, preferring fiction, health care materials for lay people, and cookbooks. As part of the team for Editing Canadian English, he copy edited both editions.
This year’s cash prize was made possible by grants from EAC and several publishers: HarperCollins, Random House of Canada, Breakwater Books, Orca Book Publishers, UBC Press, Madison, the C.D. Howe Institute, New Society Publishers, the University of Calgary Press and Macfarlane Walter & Ross.
The Tom Fairley Award, established in 1983 and presented annually by EAC, recognizes the editor’s often invisible contribution to written communication.