Michael Christie was "thrilled and surprised" that his collection of short stories The Beggar's Garden was awarded the city's book award Oct. 18.
"There're so many great books on the list, I certainly didn't expect it," said the 35-yearold who received a $2,000 prize.
The other finalists were Lynne Bowen's Whoever Gives Us Bread, library writer in residence Wayde Compton's After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing and Region, and former Courier fiction contest winter Lesley McKnight's Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Kids.
Christie's book includes nine linked stories of misfit characters in the Downtown Eastside. The former professional skateboarder, who received his master's of fine arts in creative writing from the University of B.C. in 2009, served as an outreach worker for a shelter in the area and then for the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»courthouse for six years. Christie said they were difficult jobs that led to burnout from witnessing so much suffering. "I'm not trying to show people how bad it is down there and then after I do that maybe everyone will care," Christie said. "It's a very complex situation and there are a lot of paradoxes, so it's a great fictional setting in that there are all these worlds colliding in this one neighbourhood and within the individuals in that neighbourhood."
Lee Henderson, 2009 winner of the Vancou-ver Book Award for his novel The Man Game, said he and the other independent jurors that included bookseller Emilie Dierking and poet Jim Wong-Chu, chose the four shortlisted books for their quality and style of writing, research, sense of personal connection and how they revealed different facets of Vancouver. Publishers submitted more than 50 books to be judged.
Of The Beggar's Garden, Henderson said: "It wasn't a book in a sense about a place with an acronym. It's not a DTES book."
Instead, the jurors appreciated its sensitive renderings and playful, contemporary style. The jurors favoured the innovative way Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Kids tells the city's history through the eyes of children. Henderson was impressed by the rigour of Compton's "brilliant" collection of essays. He said Bowen's non-fiction book that recounts the history of Italian immigrant settlement in B.C. and the Italian-Canadian contribution to Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»was a beautifully researched page-turner. "We all appreciated one thing in common, which was the stories of the people whose stories don't make it into TV shows and movies," Henderson said. "These are people who need books for their lives to be shed some light upon."
The Beggar's Garden was long-listed for the Giller Prize and is a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize that will be announced in two weeks.
Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
