A pair of Peninsula authors are up for B.C. Book Prizes, announced today (March 8).
Patrick Lane is nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane, edited by Russell Morton Brown and Donna Bennett, with afterword by Nicholas Bradley.
The volume represents the accumulated richness of 50 years’ work by Lane – one of Canada’s most important poets. The reader can see how he developed from an engaged recorder of hard experience—even traumatic violence—into a master poet whose meditations on nature, human frailty and love allow him to balance the world’s suffering with stunning moments of transcendent beauty and a vision of peace. The collection contains more than 400 poems. Lane was born in 1939 in Nelson, B.C., and grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General’s Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize.
His fellow nominees include John Pass for crawlspace; Susan McCaslin for Demeter Goes Skydiving; Discovery Passages by Garry Thomas Morse and Oyama Pink Shale by Sharon Thesen.
Pamela Porter is up for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize for I’ll Be Watching. In a small Prairie town like Argue, Saskatchewan, everyone knows everybody else’s business. Everyone knows that the Loney family has been barely hanging on—the father, George, reduced to drink and despair since the loss of his farm and the death of his wife, Margaret. The four Loney children do not get along with George’s second wife, the pious, bitter Effie. Then George dies in a drunken stupor. Effie skips town with a travelling Bible salesman, and it looks as though the children are done for. Who’s to save them when everyone is coping with their own problems—the lingering depression and the loss of the town’s young men to the Second World War. Yet somehow the children find a way under the watchful eye of their ghostly parents and through the small kindnesses of a few neighbours, but mostly by dint of their own determination and ingenuity.
Other nominees are Blood Red Road by Moira Young; Nowhere Else on Earth: Standing Tall for the Great Bear Rainforest by Caitlyn Vernon; The Runaway by Glen Huser and What is Real by Karen Rivers.
Visit www.bcbookprizes.ca for the full list of finalists.