Curve! and A Haida Wedding amid BC Book Prize winners
At award gala, Vancouver poet Fred Wah received Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
A VISUAL AND CULTURAL celebration of a traditional Haida wedding and an ode to carving by Indigenous women artists on the Northwest Coast are among the winners of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes announced tonight.
In the ceremony at the 41st annual gala at University Golf Club in Vancouver, the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize went to Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson with Robert Davidson for A Haida Wedding (Heritage House Publishing), a photographic book capturing their own 1996 wedding with a traditional ceremony, the first in over a century that was legalized under Haida law, and capturing the resurgence of a tradition that was nearly lost to colonial forces.
Elsewhere, the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award went to visual artist Dana Claxton and the Audain Art Museum’s Curtis Collins for Curve!: Women Carvers on the Northwest Coast (Figure 1 Publishing). It was accompanied by a sweeping exhibition at the Audain.
The Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize was awarded to Shashi Bhat, Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories (McClelland and Stewart); the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize went to Minelle Mahtani for May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers (Doubleday Canada); and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize was awarded to Leanne Dunic for wet (Talonbooks).
Li Charmaine Anne’s Crash Landing (Annick Press) took the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, while Julie Morstad’s A Face Is a Poem (Tundra Books) won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize.
The Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes was given to Sarah Leavitt for Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love (Arsenal Pulp Press).
Vancouver poet Fred Wah was recognized for his significant body of work with the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. The Governor-General’s Award winner, former Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and Officer of the Order of Canada is perhaps best-known for Diamond Grill, a biofiction about a small-town Chinese-Canadian café. Historian and archivist Linda Johnson won the Borealis Prize: The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.
The awards are overseen by the West Coast Book Prize Society, with winners chosen through a juried system. 
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