Writer and convicted bank robber Stephen Reid and children’s author Polly Horvath were the winners at the annual Victoria Book Prizes on Wednesday night.
Reid won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, while Horvath took the Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize for One Year in Coal Harbour.
A representative from publisher Thistledown Press accepted a $5,000 prize on behalf of Reid, who is serving an 18-year sentence at William Head Institution for a 1999 bank robbery in Victoria in which he and a partner held up a Cook Street bank. The pair then led police on a bullet-peppered daylight chase through Beacon Hill Park and the streets of James Bay.
A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden is a non-fiction collection of stories about Reid’s life in prison and the Victoria robbery.
Jurors wrote: “Framed by a sharply observed, imaginatively speculative and risky exploration of beachcombing, Stephen Reid’s A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden is a prison ethnography taught with wit and humanity.”
Reid began writing in 1984 while serving a sentence at the Kent Institution in Aggasiz, where he married writer Susan Musgrave in 1986. He is the author of the novel Jack Rabbit Parole and has taught creative writing at Camosun College.
Horvath was also presented with a cheque for $5,000. The Metchosin writer has won many awards for young adult literature, including a 2003 National Book Award — a top prize in American literature that Horvath received for her teen novel The Canning Season.
Jurors wrote: “Brimming with wit, imagination and insight, One Year in Coal Harbour is at once contemporary and timeless.”
The Victoria Book Prize gala, held at the Union Club, was hosted by Jo-Ann Roberts of CBC Radio’s All Points West.
Founded in 2004, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize is a partnership between the City of Victoria and Brian Butler of Butler Brothers Supplies. The Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize was founded in 2008, and is funded by Bolen Books.
