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October 14, 2008
Hope in Shadows wins 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award
Brad Cran, poet, essayist and photographer, and Gillian Jerome, poet and English teacher at the University of British Columbia, are the winners of the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award for Hope in Shadows (Arsenal Pulp Press and Pivot Legal Society), a bold collection of powerful photographs and personal stories that document the lives of residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Mayor Sam Sullivan presented the $2,000 award to Cran and Jerome during a Vancouver City Council meeting today, marking the 20th anniversary of the City of Vancouver Book Awards.
An independent jury cited the authors’ work for its surprising revelations about residents of the area who are not bound by poverty or addiction but instead driven by a sense of community, kinship and hope. For the past five years, Pivot Legal Society’s annual Hope in Shadows photography contest has empowered residents of the Downtown Eastside by providing them with disposable cameras to document their lives, resulting in more than 20,000 images of the neighbourhood, giving residents an artistic means to enter the ongoing and stormy dialogue over the place they call home.
Hope in Shadows is an intimate look at what it really means to live in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood. The result is full of grace, dignity and plain simple truths that put a human face on the single most misunderstood community in Canada.
Gillian Jerome’s work has most recently appeared in Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets. Brad Cran is a longtime contributing editor at Geist magazine and was the recipient of the inaugural Vancouver Arts Award Commission in Writing and Publishing in 2004.
The City of Vancouver Book Award is presented annually to authors of books in any genre that demonstrate excellence and enhance our understanding of Vancouver’s rich history and culture. The independent jury who chose the 2008 winner and the four shortlisted titles included freelance editor (and former publisher at Raincoast Books/Polestar) Michelle Benjamin; Sophia Books owner Marc Fournier; and Fernanda Viveiros, Executive Director of the Federation of BC Writers.
The other finalists for this year’s award were: Gary Geddes for Falsework (Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, New Brunswick); Eve Lazarus for At Home With History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes (Anvil Press, Vancouver); and Kaija Pepper for The Man Next Door Dances: The Art of Peter Bingham (Dance Collection Press, Toronto).
Media contact:
Corporate Communications
604.871.6336
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