The winners of the 2018 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards were announced on April 26, 2018, in Vancouver. The awards are presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival in four categories:
- Irene N. Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker won the Jonathan & Heather Berkowitz Prize for children and youth literature, for their graphic novel Seeking Refuge (Tradewind Books).
- Deborah Willis won the Diamond Foundation Prize for Fiction, for The Dark and Other Love Stories (W. W. Norton & Company).
- Tilar J. Mazzeo won the Pinsky Givon Family Prize for non-fiction for Irena’s Children (Gallery Books)
- Roger Frie won the Kahn Family Foundation Prize for Holocaust literature for Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford University Press).
- The poetry prize was not awarded this year.
The 2018 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards jury was comprised of: Linda Bonder, former librarian in Hebrew day schools (Victoria); Elisabeth Kushner, author and librarian (Vancouver); Dave Margoshes, writer, poet (Saskatoon); Norman Ravvin, writer, critic and Concordia University professor (Montreal); and Judith Saltman, Professor Emerita at the UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (Vancouver).
The Western Canada Jewish Book Awards are part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival in Vancouver, created to celebrate excellence in writing on Jewish themes and subjects, and showcase the achievements of authors who reside in West of the Ontario/Manitoba border, including the Northern regions. In 2018, the 34th annual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival will take place between November 24-29.