BC and Yukon Book Prizes reveal this year's selection of prize winners and award recipients
Titles include Billy-Ray Belcourt’s queer Indigenous fiction work A Minor Chorus, Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life, and more
Billy-Ray Belcourt.
A Minor Chorus.
THE EIGHT WINNERS of this year’s BC and Yukon Book Prizes, along with the recipients of two major literary awards, were announced this evening at a gala held at the University Golf Club in Vancouver.
Finalists for the West Coast Book Prize Society’s 39th annual event were revealed back in April, spanning eight categories with five nominees apiece. One title in each of the eight categories was chosen through a juried system as the prize winner.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada), a narrative of the modern queer Indigenous experience, wins the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for best fiction work. In best non-fiction, Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press) wins the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize with its account of the ways in which modern sound tech can protect and regenerate endangered species, allow humans to maintain digital dialogue with bats and honeybees, and more.
The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize goes to Otoniya J. Okot Bitek for A is for Acholi (Wolsak & Wynn), a book of historically grounded poetry that centres the marginalization of the Acholi people. Elsewhere, the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize for works that encourage the enjoyment and understanding of B.C. and Yukon is awarded to Kwändǖr by Cole Pauls (Conundrum Press). Pauls’s collection of comics celebrate and educate on cultural aspects of the Dene and Arctic peoples, from Southern Tutchone language lessons to Indigenous land acknowledgements.
In works for young readers, the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize is awarded to Rachel Hartman for In the Serpent’s Wake (Penguin Teen Canada), a fantasy ocean-sailing mission conducted to stop a war. That’s My Sweater! by Jessika Von Innerebner (Scholastic Canada Ltd.) receives the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize, with its eye-pleasing graphics that depict a relatable sibling rivalry.
The Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes is awarded to Michael J. Hathaway, who unveils the power of fungi in What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press). Wrapping up the prize winners is Chief Robert Joseph’s Namwayut: We Are All One: A Pathway to Reconciliation (Page Two Books), recipient of the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. It chronicles Joseph’s journey from residential-school survivor to change-inspiring leader.
Two additional awards were handed out at the gala. Robin Stevenson wins the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, for her widely published life’s work of 30 books for youth (multiple of which are award-winning). Plus, Katherine Munro receives the Borealis Prize: The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution, which honours her three decades of writing and publishing contributions to the Yukon Territory with haiku poetry.
Submissions for next year’s BC and Yukon Book Prizes are now open until December 1 for books published throughout 2023.
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