Kit Pearson wins
April 23rd, 2014
Kit Pearson is this year’s recipient of the annual Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. It will be presented to her by British Columbia’s Lieutenant Governor, the Honourable Judith Guichon, at the Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prizes Gala to be held at the Renaissance Vancouver Harbourside Hotel in Vancouver on Saturday, May 3, 2014. The event will be hosted by author, activist, and comedian Charles Demers.
The jury for this year’s Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence was: Sarah Ellis, children’s author and 2013 recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence; Sheila Peacock, CBC Producer; and, Jessica Walker, Store Manager at Munro’s Books.
According to the jury: “Kit is a generous member of the children’s writing community, being one of the co-founders of BC’s children’s writers and illustrators’ organization, CWILL BC, which provides writers and illustrators with a way to connect, support each other, and promote children’s books. She credits reading L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon as an inspiration for becoming a writer. She passes the tradition along. Who knows what young apprentice writer is reading one of Kit Pearson’s books right at this moment?”
Kit Pearson’s books have been published in Canada in English and French, in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, China, and Korea. She has won many awards for her writing, including the Vicky Metcalf Award for her body of work in 1998.
ABOUT KIT PEARSON
Kit Pearson was born in Edmonton in 1947 and grew up in Vancouver. She attended UBC and worked as a children’s librarian in St. Catherines, North York and Burnaby for ten years prior to receiving the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award, the Mr. Christie’s Book Award and the Geoffrey Bilson for Historical Fiction for Young People Prize for The Sky Is Falling (1989), the first of three novels about two English children evacuated to Canada to escape the bombing of World War II. Looking at the Moon (1991) and The Lights Go On Again (1993) complete the trilogy. Pearson’s A Handful of Time (1987) won a Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award and was preceded a year earlier by her first book, The Daring Game.
BOOKS:
A Pefect Gentle Knight (Penguin $20) 0-670-06682-6, 2007
This Land, Anthology Editor. Toronto: Penguin, 1998.
The Guests of War Trilogy. Toronto: Penguin, 1998.
Awake and Dreaming. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1996.
The Lights Go On Again. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1993.
Looking at the Moon. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1991.
The Singing Basket (Illustrated by Ann Blades). Groundwood, 1990.
The Sky is Falling. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1989.
A Handful of Time. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1987.
The Daring Game. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1986.
[Home page cover photo by Katherine Farris.]
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