Chuck Davis had a knack for bringing Vancouver's history into the present, encouraging his readers in the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Sun and Province to share his fascination with the people who have helped shape this city and the places that make it such a vibrant place to live and visit.
On Saturday night, while accepting the BC Book Prizes Booksellers' Choice Award on the Davis family's behalf, it was Harbour Publishing's Howard White who helped make sure that Davis, who died in 2010, was very much a presence in the SFU Woodward's theatre.
Davis never got to hold the massive Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³» his third book of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»history in his hands. He started working on the coffee table version of his research 10 years ago. Different from his previous books, it takes you day by day, year by year, through his archives of anecdotes and facts. He got up to the year 1994 and, after he was diagnosed with cancer, the book was finished in a whirlwind of research, writing and editing by a team of people who wanted to ensure his knowledge could be shared by all Vancouverites.
Their faith was rewarded, not only by the list of awards the book has collected since it was published in November 2011 (including the BC Book Prizes 2012 regional award on Saturday night), but by the fact the book sold 10,000 copies in the first six weeks.
White said Davis became a born-again historian one day while driving across the Burrard Bridge. "He realized he'd been looking at [its unique features] for years but had never seen them."
Davis researched the origins of the bridge's glowing red lights (in honour of First World War prisoners of war who gathered 'round fires to keep warm) and tiny turrets (to cover steel girders) and wrote about them in his Sun column. He, and his readers, were hooked.
It wasn't only Davis who was a multiple winner in 2012.
Giller Prize winner Esi Edugyan added the BC Book Prizes award for best fiction to the long list of accolades for her novel Half-Blood Blues.
Also having to make room for another award on her bookshelf is Charlotte Gill who, after winning British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in February, won the BC Book Prizes award for non-fiction for Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe.
The poetry prize went to John Pass for crawlspace; the illustrated Children's Literature Prize went to When I Was Small by Sara O'Leary with illustrations by Julie Morstad; and Moira Young's Blood Red Road won for best children's literature.
Lieutenant Governor Steven L. Point was on hand to present the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence to Salt Spring Island resident Brian Brett (after praising comedian and one of last year's winners, Charlie Demers, for being so entertaining as emcee.)
"In our libraries are our collective human experiences," Point told the appreciative crowd. He once told a group of young students that it was their job "to seek out that knowledge and, if possible, add to it."
To the writers and publishers at the awards ceremony he said that in telling their stories, "you take what you see and give it back to us as literature."
Brett gave a hint of his style when he opened with this line: "I was never the boy who lied to my mother; I lectured to my mother."
"All I can see is what's ahead," he added, and what's ahead angers and frightens him. He deals with that anger with words. "Being a writer means confronting the world. It means questions, like why a woman hasn't won [this award.]"
Culture, Brett said, matters "because culture is us."
For more information on the awards go to .
