This year's winner is not a journalist - well, not a full-time wage-slave journalist like the rest of us.
It's the crime writer, and one-time BBC Governor, PD - Phyllis - James for her interview, as a Radio 4 Today programme Guest Editor, with the BBC Director General Mark Thompson.
An odd decision? Maybe ... though we do spend a fair bit of our time these days talking about how we're all journalists now. And there was no question whatever that her interview best met the, very strict, criteria laid down for the award.
Nick, who died in 2006, was a unique journalist and broadcaster. I was his Editor at The World at One and The World This Weekend for a dozen years - a privilege; he was head and shoulders above any other presenter I subsequently worked with.
And for two or three simple reasons - essentially, the criteria by which the annual award in his name is made.
First: he refused to be bound by conventional wisdoms. The, often lazy, framings that other journalists imposed on events and stories.
Nick and I knew that it was in the nature of news broadcasting - particularly political news broadcasting - that curiosity and enquiry were almost always constrained by that early framing of a story. Spin doctors who could grab the framing would almost always control the story for the morning headlines. And in the fairly certain knowledge that most other journalists would follow that early framing.
I lost count of the number of times we'd re-interview someone who'd done the breakfast rounds because ... well, because those earlier interviews just hadn't been good enough.
Second: he would always insist on going back to original sources and looking for himself at the facts. It was his - and my - secret weapon in the battle against those conventional wisdoms; stripping away from the real story all those easy assumptions that mislead audiences and journalists alike.
Third: he never ducked a challenge. His job was to conduct an interview, not a conversation. At the same time, he was clear that his challenges were to illuminate things for the audience, not just to show how rough and tough he was.
Fourth: he was unfailingly polite. I never once heard him lose it, or get so involved in projecting his own ego that he lost any sense of civility or reason.
Tough criteria.
Take a listen. See if you think we got it right.
