Gaston, Hayes, de Leeuw win B.C. Book Prizes

The Government House in Victoria hosted the 29th annual B.C. Book Prizes this past Saturday, with a total of $24,000 being awarded.

Bill Gaston was the recipient of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for his novel The World (Hamish Hamilton Canada). Gaston teaches at the University of Victoria, and his fiction has won the ReLit Award and the CBC Canadian Literary Award.

Bill Gaston (photo: Monica Miller)

Derek Hayes’s British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas (Douglas & McIntyre), which won the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia earlier this year, took home the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.

Sarah de Leeuw’s poetic approach to erotic exploration of landscape in Geographies of a Lover (NeWest Press) won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. De Leeuw was awarded the CBC Literary Award for her creative non-fiction in 2009.

Other B.C. Book Prize winners include:

Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize: Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh, The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972—1975 (Harbour Publishing)

Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize: Alan Woo; Isabelle Malenfant, illus., Maggie’s Chopsticks (Kids Can Press)

Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize: Caroline Adderson, Middle of Nowhere (Groundwood Books)

Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award: Shelley Fralic, with research by Kate Bird, Making Headlines: 100 Years of The Vancouver Sun (The Vancouver Sun)

Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence: Lorna Crozier and Sarah Ellis.