Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk has won the prestigious Matt Cohen Award from the Writer's Trust of Canada, a $20,000 prize "in celebration of a writing life" -- in this case honouring the Calgarian's 20 years of environmental reporting and writing.

The award is unusual in that it can go to a fiction writer or poet as well as a non-fiction writer like Nikiforuk, who in just the past three years has published three books, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (2010), Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests (2011) and most recently, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, as well as many dozens of articles, most of them appearing on The Tyee.

"This just affirms what we already know here at The Tyee, that Andrew Nikiforuk is a national treasure. That we can afford his great reporting skills and insights an outlet and an audience is a privilege," said Tyee editor David Beers. "Andrew, all your admiring colleagues at The Tyee congratulate you!"

Nikiforuk's writings for The Tyee tend to focus on energy issues but have ranged wider. Yesterday he published an essay ruminating on how Rob Ford and Stephen Harper tap into themes of addiction and denial in the Canadian political culture. All his stories for The Tyee can be found here.