Authors Catherine B. Clement and Michelle Good take top honours for 2020 and 2021, respectively, while Fiona Tinwei Lam was named the new poet laureate
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The City of Vancouver Book Award winners for 2020 and 2021 and the new poet laureate were announced recently at a hybrid event streamed from the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch.
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Michelle Good ’s novel Five Little Indians was awarded the 2021 prize and Catherine B. Clement with Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow was the 2020 recipient.
Good’s Five Little Indians follows five friends who are scarred by the trauma they suffered as little kids at a remote church-run residential school. As teens, they land in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and try to find a way into an often-unwelcoming world.
“We all create worlds in our writing and in Five Little Indians, Vancouver makes up a significant part of the world my characters’ lives play out in,” said Good in a statement. “While writing the book, it was a real pleasure for me to draw on my memories of living in Vancouver in the ’70s and remembering the unique and vibrant city it was in the context of the times.
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“My deepest wish is that readers will come away from Five Little Indians with a deeper understanding of how trauma haunts residential school survivors forever and that this will spark them to read more, learn more and do more to achieve substantive and meaningful reconciliation,” added Good. “I am touched and honoured to win this award, given that Vancouver will always feel like home.”
Clement’s book looks at the work of Vancouver’s first and most prolific Chinese photographer, Yucho Chow, who for almost 80 years at his Chinatown studio captured the faces of many early-marginalized people denied service by white photographers. The photos in the book were collected over 10 years from private and family collections.
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“This friendly photographer had no idea how, one day, his photographs would be so instrumental in ensuring we have a more inclusive visual history of Vancouver,” said Clement in a written statement. “We owe Yucho Chow a collective debt of gratitude for the photographic record he left us. I am so grateful that the city in which he operated his small studio is the one now honouring his work through this book award.”
The new poet laureate, Fiona Tinwei Lam, has authored three poetry collections and a children’s book, and collaborated on award-winning poetry videos that have screened at festivals internationally. Her work appears in more than 40 anthologies.
“All the neighbourhoods and homes I’ve lived in, the schools I’ve attended, plus the jobs, relationships, and friendships that I’ve had in this city over the past 50 years have shaped who I am and how I see the world,” said Lam, a teacher at SFU”s Continuing Studies program, in a written statement.
Five Little Indians, Chinatown Through a Wide Lens win Vancouver Book Awards - Vancouver Sun
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