Winners were announced on Aug. 24 in the Book Awards for BC Authors during a ceremony held at the Gibsons Public Market. The contest was introduced last summer by the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society and this year attracted nearly 100 titles submitted by publishers across Canada.
Kevin Chong, a featured presenter at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts earlier this month, took top prize in the fiction category for his novel The Double Life of Benson Yu.
The first finisher among non-fiction finalists was Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places, by Vancouver-based freelance journalist Christopher Pollon.
In the Sunshine Coast voices category, Gibsons mystery writer and corporate lawyer Charlotte Morganti collected the blue ribbon for her novel Breaking News: Local Heiress Dead.
“We had traditionally- and self-published books,” explained contest organizer Cathalynn Labonté-Smith, president of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society. “I think that’s unique for our contest. We thought this would be a great opportunity for another B.C. book contest; there are a lot of writing contests, but not a lot of book contests. Books take a lot of effort.”
Bestselling author Marion McKinnon Crook announced the rankings of books for children and young adults. Candle Point, written by Nancy Deas (who grew up on Mayne Island) and illustrated by her husband Mike Deas, achieved the first prize.
Competition judges (and writers) Cynthia Sharp and Rosa Reid identified winners in the poetry category, with Kayla Czaga’s Midway — a travelogue through the geography of grief — earning top marks.
“We debated a long time because the top books were so close,” said Sharp.
“And we agreed, which is so helpful,” added Reid. Entries across the contest’s categories were evaluated by a panel of 25 judges.
The award for youth poetry went to Roman Bloom, who last year independently published All the Colours in the Virgin Sands: A Collection of Poems at the age of 15.
Prizes for humour and Indigenous voices went to two writers who made significant appearances on the Sunshine Coast in 2023. Vince Ditrich, who hosted the inaugural book awards in 2023, won for his laugh-out-loud thriller The Vicar Vortex. Gitxsan citizen and investigative journalist Angela Sterritt, who headlined last year’s Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, was honoured for her autobiographical volume Unbroken.
The category of diverse voices was topped by Harrison Mooney, author of the memoir Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery, which shares his first-person perspective on transracial adoption.
Other finalists in the category for Sunshine Coast authors were contributors to the poignant anthology Memoir & More (second place), Taylor James Waters — the pen name of fiction writer Doris Good — for her newly-published collection Mind Cuttings, and Caitlin Hicks for her account of tumultuous politics and adolescence in 1968, Kennedy Girl (honourable mention).
The competition’s first-ever About BC prize went to Daniel Marshall, author of Untold Tales of Old British Columbia. The presentation was dedicated to the memory of UBC professor emeritus Ronald Hatch, whose publishing company Ronsdale Press produced Marshall’s book.
Marshall, a professor of history at the University of Victoria, delivered a lecture about his collection of essays.
“I feel what we need in this province is a much more new and inclusive story,” Marshall observed. “I think it’s in part because of the extremely polarized times in which we live. History in some ways has become weaponized. While many good hearts are trying to right the wrongs of the past, in B.C. we have a decidedly different story.”
Marshall’s book explores multicultural aspects of the province’s evolution following the Fraser River gold rush.
The awards attracted finalists from as far away as the Okanagan Valley. Author Chad Soon, who co-wrote The Longest Shot: How Larry Kwong Changed the Face of Hockey, traveled from Vernon to attend. “It was a real honour to be included,” said Soon, whose book earned honourable mention in the youth category. “It was a thrill to be in an environment awash with so much creative expression.”
See finalist rankings at scwes.ca.
