George Ryga Award shortlist – 2025
March 13th, 2025
Once again six authors have been shortlisted for the George Ryga Award, an annual literary prize for a BC writer who has achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness in a new book published in the preceding calendar year.
They are (in no particular order):
Jim Reynolds for Canada and Colonialism: An Unfinished History (UBC Press)
David Spaner for Keefer Street (Ronsdale Press)
Gregor Craigie for Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis (Random House)
Zehra Naqvi for The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose (McClelland & Stewart)
Pat Dobie for The Tenants (Anvil)
David Geselbracht for Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis (D&M)
The winner will be announced April 15 and the award will be presented at an event at the Vancouver Public Library’s main branch at a date in June, TBA. The award comes with a $2500 purse and publicity in BC BookWorld newspaper and BCBookLook.com.
Sponsors for the award are: Yosef Wosk, The Writers Trust of Canada, Pacific BookWorld News Society and the Vancouver Public Library.
ABOUT GEORGE RYGA
One of Ryga’s best-known plays, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.
George Ryga was born in Deep Creek, Alberta in 1931. He was raised by poor immigrant Ukrainian parents as a Catholic on a farm in northern Alberta.
After seven years in a one-room country school, he left to work at a variety of occupations. In 1949, his writings for various competitions earned him a scholarship to Banff. He studied with Dr. E.P. Conklin of the University of Texas, Jerome Lawrence and Burton James. His first play broadcast on television, Indian (1961), was based on his experiences working with Cree people on his father’s farm during a period when Ryga was recovering from a bout of pneumonia. He understood how the Crees could view white man’s society as a prison. “Indian emerged out of the soil and wind of a situation in which I was painfully involved,” he later wrote.
George Ryga credited the intervention of Daryl Duke for the successful launching of Indian and, with it, his professional career. Plays for television that followed included The Storm (1962), Bitter Grass (1963), For Want of Something Better To Do (1963), The Tulip Garden (1963), Two Soldiers (1963), The Pear Tree (1963) and Man Alive (1965). At the same time, he was writing 12 short stories for radio and stage plays that included A Touch of Cruelty (1961), Half-Caste (1962), Masks & Shadows (1963), Bread Route (1963), Departures (1963), Ballad for Bill (1963), Indian (1964) and an adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1965).
Ryga was proud to think of himself as a commercial writer. In 1977, for example, he wrote a script for the American TV show The Bionic Woman entitled Garden of the Ice Palace–and it was bought and produced after several rewrites. But money was always scarce. George Ryga persevered from the Okanagan with scores of radio and television plays, plus a series of hard-edged and increasingly political novels published by Talonbooks.
The turning point for Ryga–and for Canadian drama–was his lyric documentary play about a young Indigenous woman named Rita Joe who comes to the city only to die on Skid Row. Commissioned as a work for Canada’s Centennial celebrations, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is easily one of the most moving plays that Canada has ever produced.
With its circular structure and Brechtian use of a singer outside of the action, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, for Ryga, was more than a reflection of a local case of racial prejudice. It was his attempt to express his universal disdain and intolerance for injustice. “This issue is the burning issue of our time,” he said. “It is what the Congo, Bolivia, Vietnam are about. People who are forgotten are not forgetting. To overlook them is a dangerous delusion.”
George Ryga died of cancer on November 18, 1987 at age 55.
In 2003, John Lent of Okanagan College and Alan Twigg of BC BookWorld conceived an annual George Ryga Award for the best book by a BC author that exemplifies George Ryga’s passion for social issues.
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