Western Canada Jewish Book Awards announces 2020 winners
Presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, the live virtual event revealed winning authors in five categories
Vancouver’s Alex Leslie was awarded the Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry for the collection Vancouver for Beginners.
THE THIRD EDITION of the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards took place via Zoom on December 6.
Vancouver’s Rhea Tregebov took home the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction. Tregebov, associate professor emerita in the UBC Creative Writing Program, won for Rue des Rosiers, about a young Canadian woman’s search for her own identity, which brings her to Paris in 1982 and face-to-face with the terror of an age-old enemy.
Burnaby-based children’s books writer Ellen Schwartz was awarded the Diamond Foundation Prize in the Children & Youth category. The Princess Dolls is a gentle story about friendship between a Jewish girl and a Japanese girl, set in 1942 Vancouver.
Alex Leslie, author of two short story collections and the winner of the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers, was awarded the Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry. Leslie’s Vancouver for Beginners is described as a collection where “nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards and childhood landmarks long gone”.
Olga Campbell, a visual artist whose media include photography, sculpture, mixed media painting and digital photo collage, won the Kahn Family Foundation Prize in the Holocaust category. A Whisper Across Time tells a personal and moving story of her family’s experience of the Holocaust through prose, art, and poetry for a multidimensional snapshot of losses and intergenerational trauma.
The Pinsky Givon Family Prize for non-fiction went to Calgary’s Naomi K. Lewis for Tiny Lights for Travellers. When her marriage suddenly ends and a diary is discovered documenting her beloved Opa’s escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Lewis retraces his journey to freedom.
Among the jury members were former Langara College librarian Judy Kornfeld; author and librarian Els Kushner; and Laurie Ricou, professor emeritus of English at UBC.
The Western Canada Jewish Book Awards are part of Vancouver’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. The 36th annual festival will take place from February 20 to 25, 2021.
Related Articles
