Spotlight on City of Vancouver Book Award 2018 nominees

The City of Vancouver announced the four books shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award on November 8, 2018. Three of the books are BC-published and all four finalists will be celebrated at a special event on December 8, 2018. Let’s look a little deeper into each nominated title.

Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press) by Travis Lupick has already received a lot of award recognition: it was the 2018 winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature and a finalist at the 2018 BC Book Prizes for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.

Fighting for Space is a timely contribution to the discussion of drug epidemics in North America. While deaths across the continent soar, Lupick explains the concept of harm reduction as a crucial component of a city’s response to the drug crisis. The previous epidemic in Vancouver sparked government action. Twenty years later, as the same pattern plays out in other cities, there is much that advocates for reform can learn from Vancouver’s experience.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a grassroots group of addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside organized themselves in response to a growing number of overdose deaths and demanded that addicts be given the same rights as any other citizen. Against all odds, they eventually won, transforming how the city treats its most marginalized citizens.

Travis Lupick is an award-winning journalist with more than a decade’s experience working as a staff reporter for the Georgia Straight newspaper and has also written about drug addiction, harm reduction, and mental health for other outlets. For his reporting on Canada’s opioid crisis, Lupick received the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Don McGillivray Award for the best overall investigative report of 2016 and two 2017 Jack Webster awards for excellence in BC journalism.

Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star Books) by Erín Moure is the story of a man who had no obituary and no funeral and who would have left no trace if it weren’t for the woman he’d called Toots, who took everything she remembered of him and wrote it down.

Erín Moure, a poet who once lived in Vancouver, gives a glimpse into an entire era of urban Canada, from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Main Street and Chinatown to a long-ago Montreal between the Great Depression and Expo ’67.

Erín Moure is a multilingual poet, writing in English and English/Galician, and a translator of poetry from Galician, French, Spanish, and Portuguese to English. Her most recent book of poems is Planetary Noise: The Poetry of Erín Moure, edited and introduced by Shannon Maguire (Wesleyan University Press).

No one alive now knows who Toots is.

While not published locally, Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug) by Chelene Knight is truly a local work about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Knight uses a variety of forms including letters, essays, and poems to reflect on her childhood and complex family life. In 20 letters to the current occupants of places she once lived, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory, belonging, addiction, racism, and the precariousness of housing.

Chelene Knight was born in Vancouver, and is currently the Managing Editor of Room Magazine. A graduate of The Writers’ Studio at SFU, her debut book, Braided Skin, was published in 2015 by Mother’s Tongue Publishing.

Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food (Anvil Press), is an anthology conceived of and edited by Rachel Rose during her tenure as City of Vancouver Poet Laureate.

Pairing bold new voices with award-winning writers, Sustenance, serve us poems, memories, recipes, sumptuous photos and interviews that satiate and satisfy. Each contributor looks at our living history through the lens of food in illuminating ways.

Aside from being an interesting read, Sustenance is also a community response to the needs of new arrivals or low-income families in our city. The contributors have donated their honoraria to the BC Farmers Market Nutrition Coupon Program and a portion of sales from every book goes towards providing a refugee or low-income family with fresh, locally grown produce, and at the same time will support B.C. farmers, fishers, and gardeners.

Rachel Rose‘s most recent poetry collection, Song & Spectacle (Harbour Publishing), won the Audre Lorde Award in the US and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in Canada.

The four shortlisted titles were chosen by an independent jury of Nav Nagra, Dory Nason, and Billeh Nickerson.

The celebration on Saturday, December 8 will feature an intimate conversation with authors and collaborators, followed by the announcement of the 2018 winner. It will be held in the new community space on the 9th floor at the Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch.

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