BC and Yukon Book Prizes unveil 2021 finalists in fiction, nonfiction, and more
Five Little Indians, A History of My Brief Body, and Overdose among those up for two awards each
A TALE OF Indigenous teens in the Downtown Eastside, a story of two refugees, and a deep dive into the science of fear: these are just some of the books that have made it onto the BC and Yukon Book Prizes shortlist of finalists.
The gala and awards announcement will take place September 18—more than enough time to work your way through the books on the list you haven’t checked out during pandemic downtime.
Contenders in the Ellen Wilson Fiction Prize category are: Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians (HarperCollins), the story of teens released from residential school who end up on the Downtown Eastside, and the way their paths criss-cross over the ensuing decades as they try to come to terms with their past; Aislinn Hunter’s The Certainties, (Knopf/Penguin Random House), about the entwined fates of two refugees—one starving and exhausted in 1940 Spain, the other a 1980s woman who seeks solitude on a remote Atlantic island; Shaena Lambert’s Petra, (Penguin Random House) inspired by Petra Kelly, the original Green Party leader and political activist who fought for the planet in 1980s Germany; Annabel Lyon’s Consent (Penguin Random House), about two sets of sisters whose lives are braided together when tragedy changes them forever; and Susan Sanford Blades’s Fake it So Real (Nightwood Editions), about the fallout of a punk-rock lifestyle on the future generations of one family.
Meanwhile, in the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes, the nominees span Joel Bakan’s The New Corporation (Allan Lane/Penguin), Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Brief History of My Brief Body (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House), Amber Dawn’s My Art is Killing Me and Other Poems (Arsenal Pulp Press), Five Little Indians, and Benjamin Perrin’s Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis (Viking/Penguin Random House).
The Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize contenders are A History of My Brief Body, Eva Holland’s Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear (Allan Lane/Penguin Random House), Seth Klein’s A Good War (ECW Press), Liz Levine’s Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End (Simon & Schuster) and Overdose.
Nominees in the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize category are Joseph Dandurand’s The East Side of it All (Nightwood Editions); Junie Désil’s eat salt | gaze at the ocean (Talonbooks); Valerie Mason-John’s I Am Still Your Negro (University of Regina Press); Michael Prior’s Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart); and Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1-170 (Talonbooks).
There are also nominees in categories such as children's literature, booksellers picks, and regional BC and Yukon books; you can find the complete list of winners here.
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