Book Award winners and short lists
View the shortlisted winner, finalists, and jury from current and past City of Vancouver Book Awards.
View the shortlisted winner, finalists, and jury from current and past City of Vancouver Book Awards.
Five books that cover a range of genres were selected as finalists for the 2024 Vancouver Book Award.
From a vibrant collection of poetry to a complex tale about mother-daughter relationships, the 2023 finalists represent a range of human experience and all contribute to a greater understanding of Vancouver’s diversity and history.
The 2022 finalists, all published in 2021, cover a range of genres and explore many of the city’s social and cultural issues such as displacement, homelessness, migration, and colonization. These titles also focus on connection and what it means to belong to land, community, self, and place.
Six books that cover a range of genres were selected as finalists for the annual City of Vancouver Book Awards.
The 2019 short list recognizes books that demonstrate excellence and reflect Vancouver’s unique character, rich diversity and culture, history, and residents. These books make visible our invisible social and cultural features: segregation, displacement, gendered violence, homelessness, migration, and other colonizing and disruptive forces.
Favouring connection over isolation and healing over harm, the finalist authors explore the impermanence of memory, people, places, and spaces in Vancouver’s second century.
The role of connection and healing take center stage in the four finalists for the Book Award. They explore the great mysteries of what it means to belong to land, community, self, and place.
The 2016 short list is an eclectic collection that includes a non-fiction memoir, a book of poetry, and an art exhibition catalogue. Each book reveals the complicated vision of a city coming to terms with its past and a desire to better itself.
The 2015 short list covers a range of genres: non-fiction, short stories, poetry, and a children's book. The short-listed books create a street-level walk through our city to amplify our pride and understanding of the flawed and beautiful, young but wise city we inhabit.
The books on the 2014 short list cover a range of genres: fiction, non-fiction, short stories, poetry, and biography, with each book offering original perspectives on Vancouver’s diversity.
A memoir, two books of poetry, and two non-fiction works, all of which reflect Vancouver's rich history and culture, were selected as finalists for the 2013 City of Vancouver Book Award. The 2013 short list comes from a diverse list of publishers and each book illuminates various aspects of the city and its boundaries.
The 2012 short list is dominated by books from independent presses, with writing from, about, around, and through Vancouver's literary, cultural, and geographic margins. The list celebrates the creative impulse of emerging and established writers and historic and contemporary icons who helped shape Vancouver's diverse cultural and creative communities. It embraces the examination of dark confrontations and entrenched racism in our collective history.
The 2011 short list reveals Vancouver’s history of diversity. While one book reveals the struggles of the Italian immigrant experience, another provides insight into diverse characters from the Downtown Eastside. The third book examines black history and culture in Vancouver, and the fourth portrays Vancouver’s history through a range of children’s perspectives.