John Vaillant’s real-life thriller about a man-eating Siberian tiger has won Canada’s richest prize for non-fiction. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival was named the winner of British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction on Monday. The prize is worth $40,000.

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The Kootenay Literary Competition — presented by the Kootenay Literary Competition Committee — is now open to any residents of the Kootenay region.

Kootenay Literary Competition 2010 theme: isolation. Contestants should explore this theme in their original work.

So when the Governor General Award-nominated writer mentored Kaitlin Fontana through the University of B.C.’s Booming Ground creative writing program, Lau sent Fontana feedback in old-fashioned letters.

But two years later, when Lau read Fontana’s short memoir “The Flight Album” in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, about interning for a magazine in New York, Lau had to log on to her friend’s email and instantly tell Fontana how impressed she was.

“She wrote this absolutely stunning piece… that I would have probably sacrificed a baby toe to have written myself,” Lau said.

British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-fiction is open to writers across the country and comes with a $40,000 prize.

A jury has determined a short list of 10 books, after considering 151 Canadian non-fiction titles.

Nominated for illustration of children’s literature are Kristi Bridgeman of Victoria, who brought to life the P.K. Page story Uirapuru: Based on a Brazilian Legend and Vancouverite Julie Flett, who wrote and illustrated Owls See Clearly at Night: A Michif Alphabet.

Organizers received positive feedback from participants who were pleased with the intimacy of the festival, the calibre of the guest authors, the variety of the sessions offered for writers and readers, the practical nature of the workshops provided, and the organization of the events. Even the guest authors seemed impressed.

Bowering has been a leading figure in Canadian Literature since the days of Tish magazine in the ‘60s, when a small group of young poets at the University of British Columbia set out to change Canadian poetry — and did.

Equally innovative in other genres, Bowering was a leader in the movement to post-realist, post-modern fiction. His award-winning novel, Burning Water, for example, is a highly comic, deeply serious exploration of our history through the voyage of Captain George Vancouver, and Bowering’s critical writings have influenced a generation of younger writers.

The eighth annual George Ryga Award will be announced at Centre Stage Theatre in Summerland on Nov. 6, the last day of George Ryga Week.

From 1962 until his death in 1987 at the age of 55, Ryga lived on Caldwell Street in Summerland. After his death, his home has been used for the George Ryga House and Centre, but the award has been presented in Vernon or Kelowna.

Peter Hay, who was Ryga’s publisher at Talonbooks, said holding this year’s award ceremony in Summerland is an important change.

“It’s a repatriation in may ways of George into Summerland,” he said. “Summerland is ambivalent about his legacy.”

Throughout his life, Ryga wrote plays and novels with social justice themes, often about the plight of those who have been marginalized or forgotten.

“George Ryga was very burdened by the responsibility of the artist to speak out,” Hay said.

Mayor Gregor Robertson presented the $2,000 prize to editor Scott Steedman at a city council meeting Wednesday. Steedman, a freelance editor and author, shares the award with Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville, who chose images for the book.

Visual artists such as Robert Davidson, Emily Carr, Frederick Varley, Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, Jin-me Yoon, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall are represented in the book. All the images are from the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery and were displayed in the show of the same name at the gallery from January through April.

Here, we chat with Hal Wake, the festival’s artistic director, about what writers and readers can expect this year:

The book, Voices of British Columbia by Robert Budd, captures the oral histories of B.C. pioneers. The digital edition is formatted to read like a printed book, but it features enhancements that mimic the experience of using the web. The electronic version, for example, includes links to audio files so readers can hear pioneers’ voices as they read about them. While the print version of the book comes with three CDs, the digital edition condenses the media into one package, catering to readers’ web-influenced predilection for sifting through an assortment of multimedia sources to enrich their knowledge.

“Our strategy is to enhance the existing book that you have,” Finkelstein told the Georgia Straight at a nearby coffee shop.

“You’d never know from my voice I used to be a staff announcer at CBC,” he says, referring to the fluid in his lungs.

The crowd turns sombre, but Davis won’t have it. He assures the audience they just heard a very funny joke, and as laughter ripples through the crowd, everyone seems to realize he’s right.

Davis, 74, is that rare individual whose lifespan seems far too meager to accommodate his vitality. Speaking at the Public Salon, an event that brought together a collection of brilliant and notable people from the community, Davis speaks last. He reveals his untreatable cancer, something he found out only two days prior, and says he almost certainly won’t have the time to finish what will likely be the most comprehensive history of Vancouver ever written, what Davis calls, “The capstone of my writing career.”

The as yet unfinished book is called The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, which he says focuses mainly on the central city but also includes the suburbs.

The finalists are:

The Box, by George Bowering. Ten stories are introduced by archival photographs.

Visions of British Columbia, by Bruce Grenville and Scott Steedman. Images by notable B.C. artists are paired with texts from acclaimed B.C. writers.

Common Ground in a Liquid City, by Matt Hern. A series of essays and images use Vancouver in this exploration of the urban future.

A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver, by Chris MacDonald. A full-colour pocket guidebook featuring Vancouver’s most interesting and innovative buildings.

How did poems come to have a place on public transit in the city? The origins of B.C.’s Poetry in Transit can be traced back to London’s Poems on the Underground program that began in 1986 with short poems or excerpts by established poets displayed in subway cars. Programs also sprung up in Paris and Dublin. Following their lead, Molly Peacock, president of the Poetry Society of America, worked with New York City Transit to develop their Poetry in Motion program. It debuted in 1992 with poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and Lucille Clifton.