Victoria writer Monique Gray Smith has won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize for her book My Heart Fills With Happiness.
Illustrated by Julie Flett, My Heart Fills With Happiness is published by Victoria-based Orca Book Publishers.
The award was announced at the 33rd B.C. Book Prizes in Vancouver last weekend.
Vancouver Island writer Jennifer Manuel won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (best work of fiction) for The Heaviness of Things That Float.
Douglas Coupland won the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, recognizing B.C. writers who have contributed to the development of literary excellence in the province.
The other winners were: Neil J. Sterritt (Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize) for Mapping My Way Home: A Gitxsan History; Deborah Campbell (Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize) for A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War; Adele Barclay (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) for If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You; Iain Lawrence (Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize) for The Skeleton Tree; and Richard Wagamese (Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award) for Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations.