The BC Book Prizes, established in 1985, celebrate the achievements of British Columbia writers and publishers.
The seven Prizes, plus The Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, are presented annually at the Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prize Gala in April.
The Prizes are administered and awarded by members of a non-profit society who represent all facets of the publishing and writing community.
publishers note: The award committee maintain a superb web site. Of all the awards that I monitor world wide (some 200 plus) it is right-up there with the very best- so to is the quality of the shortlist and winners. A fraction of the details regarding the award are included on this page and will hopefully serve to bring the BC Awards to the attention of visitors to this and our sister sites throughout the world. Love it! KJP
Official Site
Fiction | Non-Fiction | Poetry | Regional | Children's Literature | Illustrated Children's Literature | Booksellers Choice | Lieutenant Governor
2008 Winners
Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Winner
previous fiction winners 1985- 2007
Supported by Friesens, Transcontinental and Webcom
Judges: Margaret Gunning, Rob Wiersema and Carol Windley
Conceit
by Mary Novik -
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
This lush and lyrical novel is centred on the life of the historical character Pegge Donne, daughter of the great English love poet John Donne. Conceit brings to life a passionate, intelligent girl and woman set against the backdrop of the courtly world of late Elizabethan London and the turmoil of the ensuing decades, including the catastrophic Great Fire of 1666. Like Girl With a Pearl Earring, Conceit is a vivid and intelligent novel with a complex female character at its heart. Mary Novik is a former English and Creative Writing instructor at Langara College and was poetry reviewer for The Vancouver Sun for five years. This is her first published novel. Authors website
Other Fiction Shortlisted
Adam’s Peak
by Heather Burt
Publisher: The Dundurn Group
On a stifling August day, six-year-old Clare Fraser and seven-year-old Rudy Vantwest make eye contact from opposite sides of their street. For an instant they are connected, then each turns away—Clare to the shelter of the garden sprinkler, Rudy to the excitement of his brother’s impending birth. Twenty-five years later, Clare and Rudy, strangers living continents apart, are connected again. Overturning the guarded, insular lives they both lead, two events—one an accident, the other an act of terror—transform them both and bind their families irrevocably. Heather Burt teaches English and Creative Writing at Langara College in Vancouver. This is her first book.
Radiance
by Shaena Lambert
Publisher: Random House Canada
It’s 1952. Eighteen-year-old Hiroshima survivor Keiko Kitigawa arrives in New York City for plastic surgery. Sponsored by The Hiroshima Project, Keiko is expected to be a media darling, “The Hiroshima Maiden,” selected for her scarred beauty and for the talent she briefly revealed to Project doctors in Japan as she put into words the inexpressible horrors she has witnessed. But the Keiko who arrives in America does not perform as scripted and Keiko’s suburban host mother, Daisy Lawrence, faces a few surprises. Shaena Lambert is a fiction writer and poet whose first book, a collection of short stories called The Falling Woman, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She lives in Vancouver. More
The Reckoning of Boston Jim
by Claire Mulligan
Publisher: Brindle & Glass
In this debut novel, set at the height of the Cariboo Gold Rush, two men meet only briefly yet their lives are inextricably bound together. “Boston” Jim Milroy, a lone trapper and trader with a tragic unreckoned past, has become obsessed with reciprocating a seemingly minor kindness from the loquacious Dora Hume, a settler in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island. Dora’s kindness and her life story haunt Boston Jim, and his precise recollections inspire his attempts to buy something suitable for her. Eventually his search leads him to the gold rush town of Barkerville on the trail of Dora’s capricious husband Eugene—the one thing, after all, that she really wants. Since graduating from UBC, Claire Mulligan’s award-winning short stories have appeared in many literary publications. She currently lives in Pennsylvania. More
Soucouyant
by David Chariandy
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
A soucouyant is an evil spirit in Caribbean folklore, and a symbol here of the distant and dimly remembered legacies that continue to haunt the Americas. This first novel, set in Ontario in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, focuses on a Canadian-born son who despairingly abandons his Caribbean-born mother suffering from dementia. The son returns after two years to confront his mother but also a young woman who now mysteriously occupies the house. In his desire to atone for his past and live anew, he is compelled to imagine his mother’s life before it all slips into darkness: her arrival in Canada during the early 1960s, her childhood in Trinidad during the Second World War, and her lurking secret that each have tried to forget. David Chariandy lives in Vancouver and teaches in the Department of English at SFU. More
Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize Winner
Supported by Abebooks
Judges: Kirk LaPointe, Rita Moir and Harold Rhenisch
Everywhere Being is Dancing
by Robert Bringhurst
Publisher: Gaspereau Press
In this companion volume to The Tree of Meaning (2006), Robert Bringhurst collects talks and meditations under the principle that “everything is related to everything else.” His studies of poetry, polyphonics, oral literature, storytelling, translation, mythology, homogeny, cultural ecology, literary criticism, and typography all build upon this sense of basic connection and his thinking involves the work of poets, musicians, and philosophers. Robert Bringhurst, recipient of the 2005 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, is a poet, typographer, and linguist, well known for his award-winning translations of the Haida storytellers Skaay and Ghandl, and for his translations of the early Greek philosopher-poet Parmenides. He lives on Quadra Island.
Other Shortlisted
The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
by J. B. MacKinnon, Alisa Smith
Publisher: Random House Canada
Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden
by Don Gayton
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Phantom Limb
by Theresa Kishkan
Publisher: Thistledown Press
The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-67
by Patricia E. Roy
Publisher: UBC Press
Advancement of Science Award for magazine journalism for 2001. She lives in Vancouver
2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize Winner
Supported by the BC Teachers’ Federation
Judges: Elizabeth Bachinsky, Kate Braid and John Pass
Forage
by Rita Wong
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
A vividly described, fierce commentary on our international political landscape and the injustices it breeds, this collection of poems holds sharply modern and timely opinions. It also features marginalia, Chinese characters, and photos to give depth to the poetry’s political context. Bridging cultures and contexts, Forage manages to be instructive without being pedantic, thought-provoking while still calling forth humour and beauty. Rita Wong’s first book, monkeypuzzle, was published by Press Gang in 1998 and received the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writer Award. She lives in Miami and Vancouver and teaches Critical and Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr Institute.
Other shortlisted
The Incorrection
by George McWhirter
Publisher: Oolichan Books
Ox
by Christopher Patton
Publisher: Véhicule Press
Soft Geography
by Gillian Wigmore
Publisher: Caitlin Press
2008 Winner Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
Supported by BC 150
Judges: David Lester, Kate Walker and Judith Williams
The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
by J. B. MacKinnon, Alisa Smith
Publisher: Random House Canada
When this Vancouver couple learned that the average ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the people and places that produced what they ate. For one year, they would consume only food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their apartment. The pair’s discoveries sometimes shook their resolve as they got personal with issues ranging from global economics to biodiversity and immersed themselves in the seasons. The 100-Mile Diet has attracted media and grassroots interest around the world. Alisa Smith is a freelance writer. J. B. MacKinnon is the author of Dead Man in Paradise, which won the 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize.
Other Shortlisted
Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in the Pacific Northwest
by Barry Gough
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest
by Ian McAllister
Publisher: Greystone Books
The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture
by Tim Bowling
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Spirit In the Grass: The Cariboo Chilcotin’s Forgotten Landscape
by Chris Harris
Publisher: Country Light Publishing
2008 Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize Winner
Supported by the BC Library Association
Judges: Julie Burtinshaw, Shelley Hrdlitschka and David Ward
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane
by Polly Horvath
Publisher: Groundwood Books
Like her National Book Award-winning The Canning Season, The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane is filled with plot twists and extraordinarily strange characters. It is also a moving meditation on loss and finding family in the most unlikely places. Following the death of their parents, two cousins are sent to live with their distant, scholarly uncle and his eccentric house staff. Told in four characters’ voices, the novel is a layered account of one bad year from multiple points of view linking humour and pain. Polly Horvath has written many award-winning books for children and young adults, including The Trolls and Everything on a Waffle, which won the Sheila Egoff Prize in 2002. She lives in Victoria.
Other Shortlisted
The Alchemist’s Dream
by John Wilson
Publisher: Key Porter Books
Baboon: A Novel
by David Jones
Publisher: Annick Press
For Now
by Gayle Friesen
Publisher: Kids Can Press
Porcupine
by Meg Tilly
Publisher: Tundra Books
2008 Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize Winner
Supported by Kate Walker and Company
Judges: Alison Acheson, Kathryn Shoemaker and John Wilson
A Sea-Wishing Day
by Robert Heidbreder
Illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton
Publisher: Kids Can Press
On a hot summer day, a wish transforms an urban backyard into a place of breezy high-seas adventure. As our bold Captain and Skipper ride the salty waves, they encounter a beastly sea monster, buried treasure, a scurvy pirate crew, lovely mermaids, and more. The creative pair who brought you the acclaimed I Wished for a Unicorn offer up another celebration of the boundless distances a childhood wish can travel. A retired elementary school teacher, Robert Heidbreder has been enchanting children with his joyful poems and rhymes for more than two decades. His 2005 book, Drumheller Dinosaur Dance, won the BC Chocolate Lily Young Readers’ Choice Award. Kady MacDonald Denton is an author and illustrator of books for children and lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
The Day It All Blew Away
by Lisa Cinar
Publisher: Simply Read Books
Elf the Eagle
by Ron Smith
Illustrated by Ruth Campbell
Publisher: Oolichan Books
Jeffrey and Sloth
by Kari-Lynn Winters
Illustrated by Ben Hodson
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Pink
by Nan Gregory
Illustrated by Luc Melanson
Publisher: Groundwood Books
2008 Winner BC Booksellers’ Choice Award in Honour of Bill Duthie
Supported by BC Booksellers’ Association and Duthie Books
Judged by members of the BC Booksellers’ Association
The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest
by Ian McAllister
Publisher: Greystone Books
For seventeen years, Ian McAllister has lived on the rugged north coast of BC. This book—which includes an introduction by Paul Paquet and contributions by Chris Darimont—follows McAllister’s experiences during that period following two packs of wolves. Their behaviour—which depends on the vast old-growth forest—is documented in words and pictures as they fish for salmon in the fall, target seals hauled out on rocks in winter, and give birth to their young in the base of thousand-year-old cedar trees in spring. Most interestingly, scientific studies reveal a genetically distinct population of wolves—one that is increasingly threatened by human incursions. McAllister’s first book, The Great Bear Rainforest (1997), co-authored with his wife, Karen McAllister, and Cameron Young, won the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. He lives on Denny Island in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest.
Other Shortlisted:
The Blue Flames that Keep Us Warm: Mike McCardell’s Favourite Stories
by Mike McCardell
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs
by Grant Arnold, Michael Turner
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre and Vancouver Art Gallery
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Spirit In the Grass: The Cariboo Chilcotin’s Forgotten Landscape
by Chris Harris
Publisher: Country Light Publishing
2008 Winner Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence
Gary Geddes
“From 15 Canadian Poets to Skookum Wawa to 20th Century Poetry and Poetics, Gary Geddes has raised the literary profile of both our province and nation, and has long been considered one of Canada’s most important men of letters. He has given decades of his life to teaching Canadian literature and the craft of writing as well as working as a university professor, writer-in-residence, critic, anthologist, translator, editor, and most importantly, writer. Gary Geddes’ writings have crossed countries and continents in performance and translation. He has received numerous awards, including the E. J. Pratt Medal, a Canadian Authors Association prize, two Archibald Lampman awards, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize for service to literature and the people of Chile. His work as a poet has been generous in its outward-looking gaze. His poems bring song and light into darkened corners of the human experience, document silent and hidden lives, and enter politics through the individual and the personal. His newest book of poems, Falsework, explores the 1958 collapse of Vancouver’s Second Narrows Bridge. His meditative memoir Sailing Home: A Journey Through Time, Place, and Memory (2001) chronicles his return to the West Coast with a deep sense of awe and gratitude for the beauty, wildness, and history of this place. In whatever genre he pursues, Gary Geddes writes with eloquence and intense awareness of mystery within the commonplace, and the single human voice singing inside the crowd. He tells the truth, in all its rawness and splendour.
2007 Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction Winner
Home Schooling
by Carol Windley
Publisher: Cormorant Books
Shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Home Schooling is a collection of seven outstanding stories, each set against the rural landscape of Vancouver Island and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. In these stories the memories and dreams of characters are examined, revealing them to be both cages and keys to the cages. Carol Windley creates a sense of place and of people that breathe the cool wet air of a spring morning on Gabriola Island. Her debut collection of stories, Visible Light, won the 1993 Bumbershoot Award (Weyerhauser’s fiction prize), and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Carol lives in Nanaimo.
2007 Winner Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust
by Heather Pringle
Publisher: Viking Canada
The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust
Prehistory, according to Heinrich Himmler, had to be rewritten. The chief of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and architect of the Nazi death camps believed that Germany’s ancestors had evolved in the icy barrens of the Arctic, where they ruled as an invincible master race. Now, he theorized, only in select parts of the world did some true Aryan blood remain. In 1935 he founded the Ahnenerbe—a research institute to manufacture archaeological evidence for political purposes. Heather Pringle paints a compelling and sinister portrait of the Ahnenerbe and its role in the Holocaust. Heather Pringle is the author of three books and won the American Association for the 2007 Winner Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Strike/Slip
by Don McKay
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the fault line between poetry and landscape; nuzzles the cold silence of geologic time; meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss; and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes, and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Don McKay has previously published ten books of poetry. His work has received national acclaim and honours such as two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Poetry, for Night Field (1991) and for Another Gravity (2000). He was the Jack McClelland Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto for 2007, but otherwise lives in British Columbia.
2007 Winner Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
Made to Measure: A History of Land Surveying in British Columbia
by Katherine Gordon
Publisher: Sono Nis Press
Made to Measure: A History of Land Surveying in British Columbia
The settlement history of British Columbia—this rough and beautiful child of imperial ambition—is different from that of any other province in Canada. The work of land surveyors has been fundamental in that history. The story of their work is awe inspiring. This popular history tells the remarkable story of the men and women who measured the province: their adventures, challenges, and accomplishments. Katherine Gordon is a full-time author and freelance writer living on Gabriola Island. She is the author of A Curious Life: The Biography of Princess Peggy Abkhazi (2002) and The Slocan: Portrait of a Valley (2004).
2007 Winner Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize
Odd Man Out
by Sarah Ellis
Publisher: Groundwood Books
Odd Man Out
Kip is spending the summer with his grandmother and his five eccentric girl cousins. Gran’s house is about to be demolished, so anything goes. When Kip bashes through an old closet, he discovers the binder his late father kept as a teenager. He’s bewildered by what he finds: puzzling lists, hair samples, old newspaper clippings, and business cards. All accompany a confidential report written by a mysterious young operative who is secretly infecting teenagers with a cell-altering virus. Sarah Ellis’s many awards include the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Mr. Christie’s Book Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Vicky Metcalf Award for a body of work. She lives in Vancouver.
2007 Winner Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize
Tale of a Great White Fish: A Sturgeon Story
by Maggie de Vries
Illustrated by Renné Benoit
Publisher: Greystone Books
Tale of a Great White Fish: A Sturgeon Story
This exciting story about one long-lived sturgeon provides insight into a little-known species. Many times in her 177 years, Big Fish has come close to death—nearly crushed in the Hell’s Gate rock slide of 1913, almost stranded when the water of Sumas Lake was drained in 1924, and threatened by a mysterious disease that killed many other sturgeon in the early 1990s. Maggie de Vries, an award-winning author of several children’s books, lives in Vancouver. Renné Bennoit is an award-winning artist who has illustrated many books for children, including Goodbye to Griffith Street, which won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize in 2005. She lives in St. Thomas, Ontario.
2007 Winner BC Booksellers' Choice Award in Honour of Bill Duthie
David Suzuki: The Autobiography
by David Suzuki
Publisher: Greystone Books
David Suzuki: The Autobiography
This second installment of David Suzuki’s autobiography begins with the racism that Suzuki experienced when he and his family were detained in an internment camp in Canada during the Second World War, describes his teenage years in Southern Ontario, his college and postgraduate experiences in the US, and his career as a geneticist and later as the host of The Nature of Things. The book also describes his metamorphosis into a leading environmentalist, writer, and thinker; the establishment of the David Suzuki Foundation; his many travels throughout the world and his meetings with international leaders; and the abiding role of nature and family in his life. David Suzuki lives in Vancouver.
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2007 Winner Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence
Patrick Lane
Fiction Winners 1985- 2007
2007
- Carol Windley, Home Schooling
- Marilyn Bowering, What It Takes to Be Human
- Bill Gaston, Gargoyles
- Anosh Irani, The Song of Kahunsha
- Adam Lewis Schroeder, Empress of Asia
2006
- Charlotte Gill, Ladykiller
- Clint Burnham, Smoke Show
- Lydia Kwa, The Walking Boy
- John Lent, So It Won't Go Away
- Audrey Thomas, Tattycoram
2005
- Pauline Holstock, Beyond Measure
- Bill Gaston, Sointula
- Theresa Kishkan, A Man in a Distant Field
- Annabel Lyon, The Best Thing for You
- Patrick Taylor, The Apprenticeship of Dr. Laverty
2004
- Caroline Adderson, Sitting Practice
- Claudia Casper, The Continuation of Love by Other Means
- Steven Galloway, Ascension
- Kevin Patterson, Country of Cold
- Janet Warner, Other Sorrows, Other Joys
2003
- Carol Shields, Unless
- Kevin Armstrong, Nightwatch
- Bill Gaston, Mount Appetite
- Nancy Lee, Dead Girls
- Gayla Reid, Closer Apart
2002
- Madeleine Thien, Simple Recipes
- Rebecca Godfrey, The Torn Skirt
- Andrew Gray, Small Accidents
- Gayla Reid, All the Seas of the World
- Timothy Taylor, Stanley Park
2001
- Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach
- Anita Rau Badami, The Hero's Walk
- Barbara Lambert, A Message for Mr. Lazarus
- Peter Trower, The Judas Hills
- Jack Whyte, Uther
2000
- Michael Turner, The Pornographer's Poem
- Caroline Adderson, A History of Forgetting
- Zsuzsi Gartner, All the Anxious Girls on Earth
- Keith Harrison, Furry Creek
- Alan R. Wilson, Before the Flood
1999
- Jack Hodgins, Broken Ground
- Loranne Brown, The Handless Maiden
- Anne Fleming, Pool-Hopping and Other Stories
1998
- Marilyn Bowering, Visible Worlds
- Sally Ireland, Fox's Nose
- Holley Rubinsky, At First I Hope for Rescue
1997
- Gail Anderson-Dargatz, The Cure for Death by Lightning
- Nick Bantock, The Venetian's Wife
- Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night
1995
- Gayla Reid, To Be There With You
- Grant Buday, Under Glass
- Patricia Robertson, City of Orphans
1994
- Caroline Adderson, Bad Imaginings
- Keith Maillard, Light In The Company Of Women
- Carol Windley, Visible Light
1993
- W.D. Valgardson, The Girl with the Botticelli Face
- J.A. Hamilton, July Nights and Other Stories
- Linda Svendsen, Marine Life
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1985
- Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life
- Mary Ellen Collura, Winners
- Charles Lillard, A Coastal Range
1986
- Keath Fraser, Foreign Affairs
1987
- Leona Gom, Housebroken
- Paulette Jiles, Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma Kola
- Rona Murray, The Indigo Dress and Other Stories
1988
- George McWhirter, Cage
- Jane Rule, Memory Board
- Robin Skelton, The Parrot Who Could
1989
- Bill Schermbrucker, Mimosa
- William Goede, Love In Beijing
- Robert Harlow, Saxophone Winter
1990
- Keith Maillard, Motet
- Marilyn Bowering, To All Appearances A Lady
- Jane Rule, After The Fire
1991
- Audrey Thomas, Wild Blue Yonder
- Sky Lee, Disappearing Moon Cafe
- Caroline Woodward, Disturbing The Peace
1992
- Don Dickinson, Blue Husbands
- M.A.C. Farrant, Sick Pigeon
- Maureen Moore, The Illuminations of Alice Mallory
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