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Book Publishing B.C. Finalists for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards

Overseen by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks) celebrate literature and works published in Canada, inspiring people to read books. These awards provide finalists and winners with valuable recognition from peers and readers across the country.

Chosen by peer assessment committees, winners in each category receive $25,000, while other finalists get $1,000. Here are the B.C. finalists in the running for the 2024 accolades:

Li Charmaine Anne, Crash Landing *Winner

This YA (young adult) debut is a searing ode to queer identity, growing up in an immigrant community, and carving a place for yourself in the world with the help of your friends.

 

Bren Simmers, The Work

The poems in The Work engage with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness. Her writing fosters a vulnerability and wit that sidestep easier tropes, a reminder that healing often comes through saying “Hello” and “Yes”; a realization that “all this noticing / was love.”

 

Brandi Bird, The All + Flesh

Explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s).

 

Bradley Peters, Sonnets from a Cell

Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.

 

Danny Ramadan, Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir

Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, Danny takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.

 

Adam de Souza, The Gulf

This YA anti-coming-of-age road trip adventure, by talented up-and-coming comic artist Adam de Souza, captures at once the angst and humor of being a teen during a time of great transition.

 

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