Last week I was down to the regular meeting of the Vancouver Historical Society. The speaker was Jason Colby, professor of environmental history at the University of Victoria.

Jason was talking about his book Orca: How We Came to Know and...

Another year has rolled around and once again The British Columbia Review is in the middle of its fundraising drive.

You know the Review, BC's best on-line book review site (and I don't say that just because I am a member of the editorial board). If you care about books and the conversation about books then why not consider helping out?

The Review's estimable man-in-charge, Richard Mackie,...

Congratulations to Adam Bunch, winner of this year's Pierre Berton Award, known officially as the Governor General's History Award for Popular Media.

I am not familiar with Adam's work -- perhaps because I live a long way from Toronto -- but as you can see from the video he is prolific in a variety of media.

The Pierre Berton prize is...

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 (...