Grandma’s a Role Model: Lockwood Prize Winner

TORONTO — The folks at Today’s Trucking would really like Carla Wintersgill, the winner of this year’s Rolf Lockwood Scholarship. For one thing, she’s tall. Bright, too.

For another, she’s a terrific writer. The magazine article that clinched the award for the 23-year-old third-year Ryerson University Journalism student was a very unusual feature about the world’s oldest profession. (Yes, that oldest profession.)

Carla, who will be graduating next Spring, wrote the piece for Ryerson’s student newspaper The Ryersonian when she was a second-year student. (If you google her name, you’ll find that she’s a very prolific writer, too).

Every year Newcom Business Media, (the publisher of Today’s Trucking and this website) sponsors a $1,000 prize for the Ryerson student who writes “the best example of a magazine article focusing on business journalism.” The student must also maintain a 3.0 grade-point average in their second-year.

The award was established by Newcom owner and founder Jim Glionna after our own editorial director Rolf Lockwood was presented with the Harvey S. Southam Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Business Press three years ago.

Carla is the fourth winner. Originally from Victoria, B.C., her dad works for Canadian Utilities Corp., and her mom’s with B.C. Ferries.

After finishing secondary school, Carla attended the University of Victoria for almost a year but then rechanneled her interests. “I thought I was going to be a teacher but changed my mind,” she said.

Among her role models, she includes her paternal grandmother Joan Wintersgill, who was born in The Barbados but who, in the mid-1950s, travelled all the way to Ottawa to study journalism at what was then Carleton College. “She was a brave woman,” Carla said. “She told me that she once met Ella Fitzgerald and Ella Fitzgerald was like, ‘what’s a sister like you doing in a town like this?'”

The award-winner is also determined to make magazine writing a career. When asked where she wants to work after graduating, she said “I’ll go wherever there’s a job.”

In accepting her award, Carla publicly thanked Newcom for making the prize possible.


Have your say


This is a moderated forum. Comments will no longer be published unless they are accompanied by a first and last name and a verifiable email address. (Today's Trucking will not publish or share the email address.) Profane language and content deemed to be libelous, racist, or threatening in nature will not be published under any circumstances.

*