Vancouver Sun: 2008 April 28
BY REBECCA WIGOD
VANCOUVER SUN
Sun Books Editor rwigod@ png. canwest. com
To no one’s surprise, The 100- Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating has won its authors, J. B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, a coveted BC Book Prize.
The memoir, cast in the popular form of a year- long experiment, documents the pair’s effort to eat nothing but locally grown food, for environmental reasons. It won them the Roderick Haig Brown Regional Prize and $ 2,000 at a downtown ceremony Saturday night.
Because of the book, the expression “100- mile diet” is now known around the world. The memoir spent months on bestsellers’ lists, neck- and- neck with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book with a similar theme by the famous American novelist Barbara Kingsolver.
At the BC Book Prizes gala, emceed by TV talk- show host Fanny Kiefer (who invites her guests, many of them authors, to “tell us more”), Mary Novik took the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her historical novel, Conceit.
Nominated last fall for the prestigious Giller Prize, it’s set in 17th- century England. Its characters include Samuel Pepys and Izaak Walton, but it’s primarily the story of poet John Donne, his passionate love for his wife and his relationship with daughter Pegge — a storyline that sprang from Novik’s imagination, since the historical record of Margaret Donne’s life is scanty.
Novik, a former English literature instructor at Langara College, has spent the last two months reading the novels of her competitors in the fiction category. Like her, finalist David Chariandy ( whose Caribbean-inflected novel is titled Soucouyant) made last fall’s Giller short list.
The Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize went to Quadra Island polymath Robert Bringhurst for Everywhere Being Is Dancing. It’s a collection of talks and meditations on the principle that “everything is related to everything else.”
Bringhurst is a translator known for his English renderings of Haida legends, so accompanying the book’s English narrative are passages in Haida, Tlingit, Cree, Chinese, German and Russian.
Rita Wong, an assistant professor at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for Forage. It’s her second collection and, with a cover photo showing a mountain of discarded circuitboards, is concerned with the environment and methods of taking political action.
B. C. Lt.- Gov. Steven Point attended the festivities, presenting the $5,000 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence to Gary Geddes. It was established five years ago to reward writers who have made major contributions to the development of literary excellence in B. C. Geddes has an impressive body of work in several genres — poetry and memoir, particularly — and had vast influence on emerging writers during his years as a professor.
http://www.bcbookprizes.ca/winners
