West coast author Esi Edugyan at her home in her library north of Victoria, B.C.Chad Hipolito for The Globe and Mail
Esi Edugyan can add another honour to her long list of awards for Half-Blood Blues. On Saturday night, the novel – which centres on the arrest and subsequent disappearance of a gifted black jazz musician in Nazi-occupied Europe – won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, as the BC Book Prizes were handed out in Vancouver Saturday.
Charlotte Gill's tree-planting memoir Eating Dirt, which earlier this year won the British Columbia National Award for Creative Non-Fiction, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.
Chuck Davis's comprehensive The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver, which was published posthumously last year, picked up two prizes: the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award.
Other winners included John Pass's crawlspace for poetry, When I Was Small by Sara O'Leary and illustrated by Julie Morstad for illustrated children's literature, and Moira Young's Blood Red Road for children's literature.
Each prize was worth $2000, with the exception of the previously-announced winner of the Lieutenant-Governor's Award for Literary Excellence. Brian Brett, author of Trauma Farm, received $5000.