Victoria's best books of 2023

• Yes, I'm a student
• Yes, I'm a parent
• Yes, I work in education
• No, it's just fall to me

Today’s approx read time: 6 minutes

With a $5K prize, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize—which has been awarded for 20 years—is bestowed upon a Greater Victoria author for the best book published in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry.

The five 2023 finalists, chosen by a jury of local literary arts representatives, are:

• Maleea Acker for Hesitating Once to Feel Glory 
• Robert Amos for E.J. Hughes: Canadian War Artist 
• Mary Bomford for Red Dust and Cicada Songs
• Pauline Holdstock for Confessions with Keith
• Katłįà (Catherine) Lafferty for This House Is Not a Home 

The City of Victoria Children’s Book Prize will also award $5K to a local author or illustrator. Its finalists are:

• Sara Cassidy for Union
• Monique Gray Smith for I Hope / nipakosêyimon
• Julie McLaughlin (illustration) for Little Pine Cone: Wild Fires and the Natural World

Winners for both categories will be announced Oct. 11.

Last year’s Children’s Book Prize winner was Wendy Proverbs for Aggie and Mudgy, which chronicles a fictional journey based on the real story of how her mother and aunt were taken to Residential School.
Capital Daily profiled her and her book here.

Esi Edugyan via Booker Prize profile page

Victoria writer to chair judging for Booker Prize

Last year’s Victoria Book Prize winner Esi Edugyan was just chosen to lead the judging of 2023’s Booker Prize, a notable award for the year’s best English-language novel (as long as it has been published in the UK or Ireland).

Finalists are announced on Sep. 21, and the winner gets £50K ($85K CAD). Edugyan was shortlisted for the Booker Prize herself in 2011 and 2018.

Time to spare? How about some spare ribs?

You know we’re officially into the fall portion of fun things to do in this town when the juicy meat starts falling off the bone at Bullen Park.

RibFest is back in Esquimalt for its 10th year.

The Esquimalt Firefighters Charitable Foundation, the Esquimalt RibFest Society, and seven local non-profit groups host the event each year.

On top of raising local meat lovers’ spirits, they’ve managed to raise more than $1M for local charities in the past decade.

Ribfest takes place at Bullen Park from 11am to 10pm tonight, 11am-9pm tomorrow.

Read Emma Boyne’s full story on the festival and its BBQ teams.

Local housing has become so expensive, and so scarce, that in recent years it has kept some students out of school.

While some university students who find nowhere to live resort to couch-surfing or even camping in the first month just to be in town for classes, others end up having to give up on the semester entirely.

That was the case with Anna Buck in 2021’s return to in-person class—but in her case, it lost her $10,000 in scholarships when UVic would not allow her to defer her third year. She told Capital Daily she reached out to hundreds of listings but only heard back from four, and that driving down to Victoria from Campbell River every weekend to look in person proved fruitless.

Capital Daily spoke to her as part of this week’s look into rental scams that prey on students, and the desperate housing environment that facilitates them.

More on that here.

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