Vancouver Sun: 2008 March 6
The book The 100-Mile Diet, by J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, is a finalist for two B.C. Book Prizes this year. So is Ian McAllister’s The Last Wild Wolves, and so is Chris Harris’s Spirit in the Grass, about B.C.’s Cariboo-Chilcotin region.
The 100-Mile Diet, subtitled A Year of Local Eating, is nominated for the Hubert Evans NonFiction Prize and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.
The Last Wild Wolves, subtitled Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest and illustrated with the author’s wolf photos, is up for the the regional prize and the B.C. Booksellers’ Choice Award.
Also a finalist for those two prizes is Spirit in the Grass, subtitled The Cariboo-Chilcotin’s Forgotten Landscape.
There are seven B.C. Book Prizes in all with the prominent one being the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Winners each receive $2,000 and will be announced April 26.
It looks as if judges will have a particularly hard time picking the winner of the Booksellers’ Choice Award, which is shared between an author and a publisher. In contention are five fine entries — not only McAllister’s wolves book (published by Greystone Books, an imprint of Douglas & McIntyre) and Harris’s Cariboo-Chilcotin book (Country Light Publishing), but also Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (D&M); Mike McCardell’s The Blue Flames That Keep Us Warm (Harbour Publishing) and Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, by Grant Arnold, Michael Turner and the Vancouver Art Gallery (D&M).
These are the finalists in the other six categories:
Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
David Chariandy, Soucouyant
Heather Burt, Adam’s Peak
Shaena Lambert, Radiance
Claire Mulligan, The Reckoning of Boston Jim
Mary Novik, Conceit
Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
Theresa Kishkan, Limb
Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing
Patricia Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-67
J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, The 100-Mile Diet
Don Gayton, Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden
Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
George McWhirter, The Incorrection
Christopher Patton, Ox A
rleen Paré, Paper Trail
Gillian Wigmore, Soft Geography
Rita Wong, Forage
Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
Tim Bowling, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture
Chris Harris, Spirit in the Grass
Barry Gough, Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in the Pacific Northwest
J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, The 100-Mile Diet
Ian McAllister, The Last Wild Wolves
Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize
Gayle Friesen, For Now
Polly Horvath, The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane
David Jones, Baboon
Meg Tilly, Porcupine
John Wilson, The Alchemist’s Dream
Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize
Lisa Cinar (author/illustrator), The Day it All Blew Away
Nan Gregory (author), Luc Melanson (illustrator), Pink
Robert Heidbreder (author), Kady MacDonald Denton (illustrator), A Sea-Wishing Day
Ron Smith (author), Ruth Campbell (illustrator), Elf the Eagle
Kari-Lynn Winters (author), Ben Hodson (illustrator), Jeffrey and Sloth
