2009 Vancouver Book Award Finalists
Author & Title Information
The three short-listed titles were chosen by an independent jury that included:
- Janice Douglas, librarian
- Fred Wah, poet
- Fernanda Viveiros, Executive Director of the Federation of BC Writers
This jury also selected the winning entry.
2009 WINNER
Lee Henderson
The Man Game (Penguin Canada)
The Book: A fascinating story featuring quirky characters, nude wrestling and insights into early Vancouver culture. Henderson’s portraits of first nations, lumberjacks, vaudeville performers, race relations and class conflict in frontier BC are presented with humour and authenticity. This book, according to the independent jury, was a ‘grabber’ from the start.
Lee Henderson is the author of the award-winning short story collection The Broken Record Technique (2002). His book The Man Game won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize at the 2009 BC Book Prizes. He is a contributing editor to the arts magazines Border Crossings in Canada and Contemporary in the UK. He has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals and co-organizes Father Zosima Presents, a monthly night of sound performances where he lives in Vancouver, B.C.
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2009 FINALIST
Gabor Maté
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (Vintage Canada)
The Book: A refreshing performance of social critique that mixes documentary, medical analysis, and personal life-writing to provoke reflection on addiction and the various sites it surfaces in, most particularly Vancouver’s downtown eastside. Maté manages to balance the subjective and the objective in a debate that fosters a fuller and more poignant consideration of this personal and public blemish. The “national” response to this book underlines a considerable consensus.
Gabor Maté, M.D. is the author of the bestselling books Scattered Minds and When the Body Says No – published in ten languages on five continents – and co-author, with Gordon Neufeld, of Hold On To Your Kids. Former medical columnist for the Globe and Mail, where his byline continues to be seen on issues of health and parenting, Dr. Maté has had a family practice, worked as a palliative care physician and, most recently, with the addicted men and women in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.
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2009 FINALIST
Meredith Quartermain
Nightmarker (NeWest Press)
The Book: Nightmarker demonstrates a wide range of Quartermain’s writerly pallet. The forms she plays with in this book, the anecdote and the prose-poem, provide a stage for the geographical imagination to roam through Vancouver’s historical and physical grounding accompanied by the ghost of Captain George Vancouver. The pleasure of the book lies in the playful and dramatic voices she uses to portray the architecture, activities, and geopolitical thinking that shape the city.
Meredith Quartermain's Vancouver Walking won the BC Book Awards 2006 Prize for Poetry. Two new books have come out since then: Matter from BookThug, and Nightmarker from NeWest. Early books include The Eye-Shift of Surface, Wanders [with Robin Blaser], and A Thousand Mornings, prose poems about old Vancouver's dockside area. Her work has appeared in magazines across Canada including The Walrus, Canadian Literature, the Literary Review of Canada, Matrix, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, filling Station, Prism International, and other magazines. While in the cash-paid labour force, she taught English Literature and Composition at UBC and Capilano College. She has since enjoyed leading workshops at the Naropa Summer Writing Program and the Kootenay School of Writing. In 2002, she and husband Peter Quartermain founded Nomados Literary Publishers, through which they've published more than 30 books.
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