2007 Vancouver Book Award Finalists
Author & Title Information
Grant Arnold and Michael Turner
Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs
Anita Rau Badami
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Brett Josef Grubisic
The Age of Cities
Michael Kluckner
Vancouver Remembered
Note: authors listed in alphabetical order
Grant Arnold and Michael Turner
Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs
Douglas & McIntyre and the Vancouver Art Gallery:
http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com 
http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/
Jury Comments: an invaluable record of the intersection of people and place in Vancouver’s 1950s urban landscape. The book is based on the exhibition of Herzog’s body of work mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007.
The Book: For half a century, his camera’s lens settled on the raw urban landscape of Vancouver, but it was not until recently that many eyes had the opportunity to rest on the photography of Fred Herzog. That changes with his first-ever solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the new book from Douglas & McIntyre.
Originally from Stuttgart, Fred Herzog came to Vancouver in 1953. His work is outstanding due in part to the outsider’s view that allowed him to find beauty in the quotidian Vancouver of 1950s and ‘60s. In a time when “art” photography was shot almost exclusively in black and white, Herzog bucked the norm, shooting vibrant, spontaneous, documentary-style color images that evoked the energy and excitement of what was at the time still a relatively young city. Fred Herzog’s Vancouver is cosmopolitan and erupting with life.
The upcoming book features over 100 evocative images from Herzog’s body of work, along with an informative interview with the author. Essays by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Michael Turner, renowned author of Hard Core Logo round out this visually arresting book. The exhibition of Fred Herzog’s work ran at the Vancouver Art Gallery from January 25-March 13, 2007.
Grant Arnold has worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery since 1992, where he is now the first Audain Curator of British Columbia Art. He has organized more than thirty exhibitions, including Real Pictures: Photographs from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft; Rodney Graham: A Little Thought (with Jessica Bradley and Cornelia Butler); Liz Magor (with Philip Monk) and Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of Greater Fragmentation.
Michael Turner is one of Canada’s most original and versatile writers. His books include Company Town, Hard Core Logo – which has been adapted to radio, stage and feature film – and American Whiskey Bar, which was produced as a live television special on City TV. His most recent book, The Pornographer’s Poem, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and has been translated into four languages.
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Anita Rau Badami
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Knopf Canada:
http://www.randomhouse.ca/about/knopf.html
Jury Comments: A sweeping novel that deftly traverses time and place from 1947 to 1985 and from India’s Punjab region to the Delhi Junction Café at 49th and Main. Vancouver’s South Asian immigrant families cope with generations of homeland politics culminating in the impact of the Air India bombing.
The Book: Through kind coincidence and cruel fate, the lives of three women and their families become inescapably linked in a bond that, spanning decades and continents, begins with hope and ends with tragedy. Together, they will experience some of history’s pivotal events — the devastation of Partition, the growing conflicts between Pakistan and India, the rising fervour of Sikh self-determination, the violent resistance that leads to the storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the mass retribution killings that followed and, ultimately, an unspeakable act of terrorism that haunts Canadians to this day.
Anita Rau Badami's first novel was the hugely successful Tamarind Mem. Her bestselling second novel, The Hero’s Walk, won the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Italy’s Premio Berto and was also named a Washington Post Best Book of 2001. It was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and the Orange Prize for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. Both novels have been published around the world. The recipient of the Marion Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career, Badami currently resides in Montreal.
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Brett Josef Grubisic
The Age of Cities
Arsenal Pulp:
http://www.arsenalpulp.com
Jury Comments: An urbane, playful and gently satirical first novel which portrays and reframes, in meticulous detail, the gay subculture of mid-century Vancouver.
The Book: Equal parts Bildüngsroman and purported literary artifact, The Age of Cities is really about the age of innocence. A manuscript is discovered inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook from the 1950s: the story of a male librarian from a small town who comes to the big city at the height of the Cold War in 1959. At first he is giddy with the discovery of an urban paradise, allowing him to reinvent himself at the same time as the city is. But his accidental discovery of a gay subculture—culminating in a feverish, dream-like initiation — pushes him irrevocably towards crisis.
Written in the dialect of the time and framed by contemporary “analysis,” The Age of Cities is an imaginary artifact that is about the past and present all at once: a novel of ambiguous boundaries and invasive dichotomies. It is also about discovery, loss, and the ages-old “closet” where stories lie hidden from view.
Brett Josef Grubisic is the editor of Contra/Diction: New Queer Male Fiction and co-editor of Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions. He teaches English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
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Michael Kluckner
Vancouver Remembered
Whitecap Books:
http://whitecap.ca
Jury Comments: A gentle masterpiece which reveals layers of changing colour and light on Vancouver’s evolving neighbourhoods using the author’s own precise research and beautifully-illustrated watercolours.
The Book: This book touches on crucial points in the city’s history that determined its contemporary condition. At one time, Vancouver sat on the verge of a profound transition, the details of which are oft-forgotten in the historical musings of other books. In Vancouver Remembered, Kluckner fleshes out the layers of change endemic to the city’s most crucial points of development with a clarity and poignancy accessible to serious historians and new city residents alike. The book maps out th city’s growth in two parts, Commercial Vancouver and Residential Vancouver. Kluckner delivers a comprehensive story a far-reaching as the city limits. Through Words and images, he traces the rise of the creative underclass and the city’s wealthiest landowners, constructing a critical narrative that is as vital to understanding Vancouver’s past as it is to contextualizing the present.
Michael Kluckner is a writer and artist whose early books focus on the history of Canadian cities, heritage, planning issues and art, and include Vancouver the Way it Was, Vanishing Vancouver, Paving Paradise, and British Columbia in Watercolour. They won numerous awards, including the Duthie Prize, the Vancouver Book Prize, the Toronto Book Prize (short list), the Hallmark Society (Victoria) Award of Merit, and the Heritage Canada Medal of Achievement. He spends his life painting, writing, and travelling in search of elusive, disappearing places and the stories that can tell. A Vancouver native, he has written and illustrated a series of books that beautifully capture its atmosphere wile recording its history.
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