Michelle Shephard
| Michelle Shephard | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1972 (age 44–45) |
| Nationality | Canada |
| Occupation | author, journalist, filmmaker |
| Awards | Michener Award, National Newspaper Awards |
Michelle Shephard is an investigative reporter with the Toronto Star newspaper in Canada, author and filmmaker. She has been awarded the Michener Award for public service journalism and won Canada's top newspaper prize, the National Newspaper Award, three times. In 2011, she was an associate producer on a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. She produced the National Film Board documentary, "Prisoners of the Absurd," which premiered at Amsterdam's film festival in 2014. Shephard also co-directed a film based on her book about Omar Khadr. "Guantanamo's Child," premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.
In June 2015, Shephard was the 2015 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.
Michelle grew up in Thornhill, Ontario, and attended Thornhill Secondary School. She began working at the Star in 1995 as a summer student, when she met her future husband Jim Rankin.
She is the author of Guantanamo's Child, about the ordeal of Omar Khadr in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. She was also thanked in the foreword of the 2006 book Betrayed: The Assassination of Digna Ochoa by fellow Star reporter Linda Diebel, as well as Marina Nemat's 2008 Prisoner of Tehran.
Her second book, Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone, was published in September 2011. The book was nominated for one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
In 1999, she came into possession of copies of convicted murderer Karla Homolka's application to transfer to the Maison Thérèse-Casgrain, run by the Elizabeth Fry Society, and published the story noting the halfway house's proximity to local schools, hours before the Canadian courts issued a publication ban on the information.
On September 11, 2001, the day al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Shephard described going to the airport to fly to New York City, only to find all flights in North America had been ordered to land and no new flights were being allowed to take off. So she and two other Toronto Star reporters drove to New York City, arriving at the Ontario/New York State border shortly before it too was shut down. Covering 9/11 began her career as a national security reporter.
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