2005 Vancouver Book Award Finalists
Author & Title Information
Lance Berelowitz (2005 Winner)
Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination
Wayson Choy
All That Matters
Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane (editors)
In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver
Various authors
The Vancouver Stories: West Coast Fiction from Canada’s Best Writers
The four short-listed titles were chosen from among a record 41 entries by an independent jury that included: Keith Bunnell, University of B.C. librarian; Laurie Roggeman, Vancouver booklover and former president of the Friends of the Vancouver Public Library; and author and cultural advocate Max Wyman. This jury also selected the winning entry.
Note: authors listed in alphabetical order
Lance Berelowitz (2005 Winner)
Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination
Douglas & McIntyre 
A timely and imaginatively presented investigation
of Vancouver’s unique development as an urban centre.
The story behind Vancouver’s emerging urban form: the buildings, public spaces, extraordinary landscapes and cultural values that have turned the city into the poster-child of North American urbanism.
Located at the edge of a continent and at the corresponding edge of national public consciousness, Vancouver has developed in unique and unanticipated ways. It is now emerging as an experiment in contemporary city-making, with international interest in Vancouver as a model of post-industrial urbanism increasing exponentially.
Lance Berelowitz explores the links between the city’s seductive natural setting, its turbulent political history and changing civic values, and its planning and design culture. He also makes the startling case that Vancouver is to Canada’s imagination what Los Angeles is to the American-a mythologized place of endless possibilities, while being grounded in an altogether more limited set of socio-economic and environmental limitations.
Lance Berelowitz is a well-known urban commentator and award-winning writer. He has written extensively about Vancouver, presented papers on the city at international conferences and is sought out by the media to comment on urban issues. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Vancouver’s successful 2010 Olympic Winter Games Bid Book. He lives in Vancouver.
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Wayson Choy
All That Matters
Doubleday Canada
An evocative return to the fictional lives of the
Chen family during a vital place and period in Vancouver -- Chinatown
in the 1930s and 1940s.
Kiam-Kim is three years old when he arrives by ship at Gold Mountain with his father and his grandmother, Poh-Poh, the Old One. It is 1926, and because of famine and civil war in China, they have left their village in Toishan province to become the new family of Third Uncle, a wealthy businessman whose own wife and son are dead. The place known as Gold Mountain is Vancouver, Canada, and Third Uncle needs help in his large Chinatown warehouse. Canada’s 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act forces them, and many others, to use false documents, or ghost papers, to get past the ‘immigration demons’ and become Third Uncle’s Gold Mountain family.
This is the beginning of All That Matters, the eagerly anticipated sequel to Wayson Choy’s bestselling first novel, The Jade Peony. The author takes us once again to the Vancouver of the 1930s and 1940s to follow the lives of the Chen family, this time through the experiences of First Son, Kiam-Kim, whose childhood and adolescence in a strict but caring Chinatown family is at once strange and familiar to us.
Wayson Choy’s first novel, The Jade Peony, spent 26 weeks on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list and placed number six on its 1996 Year-End National Bestseller List for fiction. He shared the Trillium Award that year with Margaret Atwood and won the City of Vancouver Book Award. His bestselling memoir, Paper Shadows, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. All That Matters was a national bestseller, a Giller Prize finalist, and won the Trillium Award. Wayson Choy lives in Toronto.
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Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane (editors)
In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver
Talonbooks
Seven personal, complex, but hopeful stories by women
from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
News stories of the less fortunate, the socio-economically disenfranchised in North America are too often presented to fascinate or horrify their consumers with a construct of stereotypes which commodify and intentionally erase the real lives of people “covered” by the popular media.
In compiling this collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the editors set out to create a space for the voices of women who are seldom heard on their own terms—the words of people who are publicly visible yet who, due to the blur of preconceptions that surround Vancouver’s inner city, remain unseen.
To many, the women who offer their stories here are “people without history,” defined only by belonging to a neighbourhood branded by layers of stigma. Their diverse histories are rarely included in the cacophony of media depictions of urban poverty: the “drug problem,” “prostitution” or statistics on crime and violence. These women share the stories of their complex pathways from childhood into and out of the Downtown Eastside, through periods of addiction and recovery, strength and illness, affluence and poverty. They confront and challenge the familiar stereotypes applied to drug users, to “wayward women,” and to those who live with disease and/or mental illness.
Leslie Robertson’s and Dara Culhane’s introductions to both the collection and the individual stories provide an ethnographic context for complex individuals too often hidden in plain sight within a North American society which defines people more by what they have as consumers, than by who they are as people.
Leslie Robertson completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, where she has taught anthropology. She worked as a researcher on the Health and Home Project—directed by Dara Culhane—for two years and has been active in community work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She has conducted cross-cultural research in various social contexts, and her work examines the construction of meaning through oral histories and life stories. Robertson is also the author of Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a BC Mining Town, published by the University of British Columbia Press in 2004. She now teaches at the University of Windsor.
Dara Culhane received her Ph.D. in 1994 and teaches anthropology at Simon Fraser University. From 1992 to 1994, she was Deputy Director of Social and Cultural Research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Her first book, An Error in Judgement, probes the controversial 1979 death of a First Nations child who died of an undiagnosed ruptured appendix in Alert Bay, B.C. She continued her work with The Pleasure of the Crown, which offers an in-depth analysis of Aboriginal title litigation in British Columbia and examines the cultural values and biases of the courts from an anthropologist’s point of view. Culhane’s research has also appeared in BC Studies, Native Studies Review and The Journal of Human Justice.
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Various authors
The Vancouver Stories: West Coast Fiction from Canada’s Best Writers
Raincoast Books
An ensemble of short stories which reveal a richly textured mosaic of
a city building towards sophistication and urbanity.
"Sooner or later, everyone in the country came to this city by the mountains and the sea. Some just to ogle, many to stay. People here liked it with something that bordered on religious fervour." - from "City of My Dreams" by Zsuzsi Gartner
The city of Vancouver means different things to different people, but it is as revered and beloved by its residents as it is by the millions of people who visit every year. It’s a diverse, thrumming metropolis and a calm and beautiful recreation destination; it’s a young city still striving for identity and a storied settlement rich in legend. And it has been both the inspiration and setting for some of Canada’s most interesting fiction.
Framed by an incisive introduction from Douglas Coupland, the wide array of short fiction collected in Vancouver Stories reveals just how varied Vancouver really is. Discover this great city through the stories of Pauline Johnson and Emily Carr, through the eyes of such 20th-century literary giants as Alice Munro, Ethel Wilson and Malcolm Lowry, and through the words of more contemporary writers such as William Gibson, Timothy Taylor, Zsuzsi Gartner and Madeline Thien.
Spanning a period of nearly 80 years, the 15 stories in this collection present the experience of Vancouver -living here, visiting or just passing through-filtered through the imaginations of some of Canada’s most famous fiction stylists.
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