One of the Sunshine Coast’s most indefatigable authors has been shortlisted for a 2025 BC and Yukon Book Prize.
Marion McKinnon Crook’s memoir Always On Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching, and Rural Living — published in 2024 by Heritage House Publishing — was last week named a finalist for the Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award. The award is for a book that is the most successful in terms of public appeal, initiative, design, production and content. It is also the only prize where votes from BC and Yukon booksellers determine the shortlist and winner.
Crook’s earlier volume, Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, won the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Community History Award.
Always On Call was the hotly anticipated sequel to Always Pack a Candle and takes place several years after the first memoir. In it, Crook describes her adventures as an intrepid public health nurse juggling marriage, children, and a vast array of patients and cases in 1970s rural British Columbia.
“I got some good advice when I wrote the first draft,” recalled Crook during a presentation at the 2024 Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, “not to editorialize or go back and forth, but to stay in the time that you’re writing in. As I did it, I found it was more powerful than going back and forth [between the past and present]. It makes you stay in your character.”
Gibsons-based Crook is a nurse, an educator, and the author of more than 25 books. In addition to her nursing training, Crook holds a master’s degree in liberal studies and a PhD in education.
Now a full-time writer, she also writes the British Book Tour mystery series under the name of Emma Dakin. The series recounts the sleuthing of a tour leader during travels through literary locales in England and Scotland. The fifth instalment in the series was released last year as Shadows in Sussex.
Writing under her own name, Crook last year also published a fictional mystery set in the year of Vancouver’s founding: Murder in Vancouver 1886. The story follows a schoolteacher-turned-detective who attempts to prevent contraband rifles being sent to Métis rebels in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
The BC and Yukon Book Prizes, established in 1985, celebrate the achievements of British Columbia and Yukon writers, illustrators and publishers. Prizes are presented annually in 10 categories. The 2025 shortlists will be celebrated at a public soirée on May 22 at the Book Warehouse in Vancouver. The winners will be announced at the Awards Gala on Sept. 21, 2025, in Vancouver.
As part of her nomination, Crook will participate in the BC and Yukon Book Prizes On Tour program, which takes finalists on an author reading tour to schools and public venues in communities throughout BC and Yukon from May through September.
“How do I face the unknown?” she mused, reflecting on balancing a rural nursing practice and family life as chronicled in Always On Call. “I do it the way everybody does: with curiosity and a certain amount of intelligence and thoughtfulness; [sometimes] anger, and being quick to judge, and all sorts of other characteristics. Anyone who’s raised kids knows what the unknown’s all about.”
Another nominee for a 2025 BC and Yukon book prize — poet Dallas Hunt’s book Teeth — was published by Sunshine Coast-headquartered Nightwood Editions. Hunt’s volume was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, which is awarded to the author of the best work of poetry.
