One of the country's most valuable literary prizes - the $40,000 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction - has gone to Lorna Goodison for her memoir From Harvey River: A Memory of My Mother and Her People.
Goodison, who is 61 this year, received the award yesterday from B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell at a luncheon ceremony in Vancouver. Her book, published last year by Toronto-based McClelland & Stewart, bested the two other finalists for the prize, Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy by Jacques Poitras and Donald Harman Akenson's Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself. Poitras and Akenson each received $2,500 yesterday.
Goodison, a native of Jamaica, is perhaps best known as a poet - she has at least eight volumes to her credit - a painter and a short-story writer. Indeed, last year she was one of the three jurors for Canada's most prestigious fiction honour, the $40,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time among Jamaica, Toronto and Ann Arbor, Mich., where she teaches university.
David Mitchell, chair of the three-member jury and a Queen's University administrator and historian, said that deciding on the Goodison "was very difficult" because "each [finalist]was excellent in a distinct way." Goodison's lyrical blend of memory and mythology won the nod "because of the sheer pleasure of reading her memoir. She created a Jamaica that we could taste and smell. Her vivid language and poetic voice resonated with all the judges" who, besides Mitchell, included Globe and Mail senior features writer Sandra Martin and B.C. poet Patrick Lane, himself a winner, in 2005, of the inaugural B.C. non-fiction prize for his own memoir, There Is a Season.
Goodison, in the meantime, is up for another potential big pay day next month. From Harvey River is one of five finalists for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the winner of which is to be named March 3.
Now in its fourth year, the B.C. non-fiction honour is the only national literary award to originate in B.C. and is the largest prize, dollar-wise, for Canadian non-fiction. The prize is administered by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, an arm's-length government agency established in 2003. Funding derives from an $8-million endowment.