Yesterday brought news of the passing of Clyde Rose, co-founder of Newfoundland's Breakwater Books, at the age of 86.

I have written here previously about my own connection to Breakwater, which published an early book of mine way back in 1984.

Condolences to the Rose family.

The BC and Yukon Book Prizes were awarded over the weekend. The winners are:

Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize - Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada)

Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize - Karen Bakker, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press)

Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize - Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, A is for Acholi (...

Congratulations to Robin Fisher. His biography of the noted museologist/anthropologist Wilson Duff was recently awarded top prize by the BC Historical Federation at its annual meeting, held this year in Princeton.

 Officially the prize is the BC Lieutenant Governor's Award for Historical Writing but by any name it is a deserving winner, as I have...

In 1929 Virginia Woolf published her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, based on lectures she had given the previous year at Cambridge University. In it, Woolf made her famous observation that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

I doubt that the essay was widely known in Vancouver. Even so there was a group of young local women who knew the truth of...