John Lent is a Canadian poet and novelist, as well as a college teacher of creative writing and literature. He has published ten books from 1978 to 2012. His book, So It Won't Go Away, was shortlisted for the 2006 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Lent's fiction and poetry have appeared for years in magazines across Canada, including: The Malahat Review, Event, Dandelion, Grain, The Wascana Review, NeWest Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, New Quarterly, Waves, Matrix, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review. Lent has read from his work in many cities in Canada, and internationally. Lent has also published critical articles on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Thomas DeQuincey, Wyndham Lewis, Tom Wayman, Kristjana Gunnars, Mavis Gallant, Dennis Brutus and Wilfred Watson.
George Ryga was a Canadian playwright, actor and novelist. His writings explored the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, among other themes. His most famous work is The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.
Jeannette Christine Armstrong is a Canadian author, educator, artist, and activist. She was born and grew up on the Penticton Indian reserve in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, and fluently speaks both the Syilx and English languages. Armstrong has lived on the Penticton Native Reserve for most of her life and has raised her two children there. In 2013, she was appointed Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy.
The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
B.C. BookWorld is a British Columbia-based quarterly newspaper about the book trade. It was established in 1987.
(Barbara) Anne Cameron was a Canadian novelist, poet, screenwriter, short story and children's book writer.
Barry Morton Gough is a global maritime and naval historian.
The Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence is administered by the BC Book Prizes and recognizes a writer who has contributed significantly to the development of literary excellence in British Columbia, as well as having written a substantial body of literary work throughout his or her career.
Maggie de Vries, born in 1961 in Ontario, Canada is a writer for children, teens and adults and creative writing instructor. Her 2010 book, Hunger Journeys and her 2015 book Rabbit Ears both won the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize.
Benjamin Perrin is a professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Invisible Chains: Canada's Underground World of Human Trafficking is a 2010 book about human trafficking by Benjamin Perrin. Perrin wrote the book after researching human trafficking for ten years. In Invisible Chains, Perrin recounts a variety of stories of human trafficking in Canada, including that of the prostitution of a child in Ontario whose sexual services were advertised in the adult services section of Craigslist. The book was timed to be published within three weeks of the release of Joy Smith's proposal for the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking. Perrin advocated adopting Smith's proposal, saying that Invisible Chains "shows that while traffickers have a plan, Canada doesn't," and that the victims are the ones who suffer from the lack of a national action plan. Perrin promoted the book in Winnipeg, Manitoba in October 2010. Mark Milke of the Calgary Herald said that Perrin's book is "not an enjoyable read. It's depressing... but it's a necessary read," going on to say that Invisible Chains "will do much good." University of Manitoba professor Joan Durrant praised Invisible Chains, calling it a powerful book. Chester Brown condemned Invisible Chains, saying that it purports "that johns are evil monsters." In response, Brown wrote Paying for It, a graphic novel written "from the john's point of view, since of course, I don’t think of myself as an evil monster." Perrin's book was nominated for a George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, but lost to One Story, One Song, an essay collection by Richard Wagamese.
Bev Sellars is a Xat'sull writer of the award-winning book, They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School, describing her experiences within the Canadian Indian residential school system. She is also a longtime-serving Chief of the Xat'sull First Nations.
Alan Twigg, CM has received the Order of Canada, as a prolific journalist, historian, biographer, website-builder, film maker, community-builder and athlete. He created Canada's most-read, independent publication about books, BC Bookworld, a trade newspaper for the British Columbia book publishing industry and served as its publisher and main writer for thirty-three years until he gave the business away in 2020. He also founded or co-founded many of the province's major literary awards. When he was accorded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University in 2022, SFU described him as British Columbia's leading man of letters. He also developed ABCBookWorld, an online encyclopedia of British Columbia authors. He is also a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence in 2016.
Daniel Francis is a Canadian historian and writer. He has published thirty books, chiefly about Canadian, British Columbian and Vancouver history, on a broad range of subjects, from the Canadian fur trade and prohibition to the history of whaling, transportation and Indigenous peoples.
Gillian Jerome is a Canadian poet, essayist, editor and instructor. She won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2009 and the ReLit Award for Poetry in 2010. Jerome is a co-founder of Canadian Women In Literary Arts (CWILA), and also serves as the poetry editor for Geist. She is a lecturer in literature at the University of British Columbia and also runs writing workshops at the Post 750 in downtown Vancouver.
Hubert Reginald Evans was a Canadian writer. He is most noted for his 1954 novel Mist on the River, which has been described as the first Canadian novel ever to present a realistic portrait of First Nations people as its central characters.
Stephen Collis is a Canadian poet and professor. Collis is the author of several books of poetry, including On the Material and three parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”: Anarchive, The Commons, and To the Barricades. He is also the author of three books of non-fiction: Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten , Dispatches from the Occupation, and Phyllis Webb and the Common Good. In 2011, he won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for the collection On the Material. In 2019, he won the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize. He wrote Mine in 2001, Anarchive in 2005 and The Commons in 2008, and was previously shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award in 2006 for Anarchive. He teaches poetry and American literature at Simon Fraser University.
South Okanagan—Similkameen National Park Reserve is a proposed national park reserve located in the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen of British Columbia. The goal of the park is to work with the local First Nations to protect a large patch of Okanagan dry forests and part of the northern reach of the Columbia Plateau ecoregion in Canada.
Chelene Knight is a Canadian writer and poet.
Travis Lupick is a Canadian journalist and author. Lupick has worked as a staff reporter for The Georgia Straight and as a freelance reporter for the Toronto Star, and Al Jazeera English, among others.
Maggie De Vries, Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister