Congratulations to MFA alumni Amber Dawn and Léa Taranto for winning the 42th annual BC and Yukon Book Prizes.
- Amber Dawn, MFA and former faculty member, received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Buzzkill Clamshell.
- Léa Taranto, MFA, received the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize for her YA novel, A Drop in the Ocean.
Presented annually by the West Coast Book Prize Society, the BC and Yukon Book Prizes celebrate the outstanding work that is written, illustrated and published in the region. Award winners are selected through a juried system.
The jury praised Amber Dawn’s Buzzkill Clamshell as generous, specific, grisly and deeply honest in its exploration of chronic pain, illness, aging, and queer desire, “It’s like stepping into a Victorian mansion from an 80s music video with all its haunted armoires filled with sex toys and weapons and the soft-focus removed. Amber Dawn is a swift-fingered magician, a surgeon, a musician, and the “horny oracle” drawing back the fluid-crusted velvet curtain, showing the reader the gory truth in full technicolour and surround sound.”
Buzzkill Clamshell, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, is Dawn’s third poetry collection. She had previously won the City of Vancouver Book Award for her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, and the Writers’ Trust of Canada award for LGBTQ2S+ emerging writers. The acclaimed writer and activist earned her MFA in Creative Writing from UBC in 2007, and later joined our school as an adjunct professor of poetry.
Another winner of this year’s BC and Yukon Book Prizes who is also part of the UBC Creative Writing community, Léa Taranto, has credited Dawn as one of the influential UBC professors who guided her craft through kindness in an interview with UBC Magazine.
Léa Taranto graduated in Creative Writing from UBC in 2023. She started A Drop in the Ocean as her MFA autofiction thesis as a disabled Chinese Jewish Canadian writer who lives with OCD and comorbid disorders. Two years later, Arsenal Pulp Press published it as her debut novel.
Calling the novel eye-opening and empathy-building, the jury said A Drop in the Ocean is a stellar option for mature readers, “The voice in Léa Taranto’s A Drop in the Ocean grabbed us from page one and held us captivated as we hurtled through the pages. This intense, brutally honest story follows a teenage girl’s journey with mental illness during a stay in residential treatment. Mira’s story is gritty and dark, but not without hope, its authenticity bolstered by Taranto’s skillful portrayal of complex relationships.”
