If you need an excuse to buy more books, hello! Here it is. You’re so welcome.

The BC and Yukon Book Prizes have announced their 2023 winners, which means you now have a handful of authors to add to your must-read list.

Presented by the West Coast Book Prize Society, the awards, which are in their 39th year, celebrate the writers, books, publishers, and illustrators embodying the rich literary talent of these two regions.

On top of the eight book-specific prizes (which are outlined below), two writers have been given lifetime achievement awards. Robin Stevenson, who has authored 30 fiction and nonfiction books for kids and teens, has been given the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence; it honours a writer who has significantly contributed to the literary community in BC. And Katherine Munro, a poet who founded Whitehorse’s Solstice Haiku, has been awarded the Borealis Prize: The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution; it celebrates a writer who has positively impacted the publishing industry in the Yukon.

As for the book prize winners, they are:

• Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize: Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada)
• Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize: Karen Bakker, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press)
• Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize – Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, A is for Acholi (Wolsak & Wynn) 
• Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize: Cole Pauls, Kwändǖr (Conundrum Press)
• Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize: Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent's Wake (Penguin Teen Canada)
• Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize: Jessika Von Innerebner, That’s My Sweater! (Scholastic Canada)
• Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes: Michael J. Hathaway, What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press)
• Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award: Chief Robert Joseph, Namwayut: We Are All One: A Pathway to Reconciliation (Page Two Books) 

Only question now is: which independent local bookstore to get them from?