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CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH wins the 2023 CITY OF VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE!

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We’re thrilled to share that Pauline Holdstock has won the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for Confessions with Keith! Check out the full announcement on their website here.

Mayor Marianne Alto and co-sponsor Brian Butler announced the winner at the 20th annual Victoria Book Prize Gala on October 11, 2023 at the Union Club of British Columbia.

Established in 2004, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize is a partnership between the City of Victoria and Brian Butler of Butler Brothers Supplies. It awards a $5,000 prize to a Greater Victoria author for the best book published in the categories of fiction, non-fiction or poetry.

Grab your copy of Confessions with Keith here.

ABOUT CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Winner of the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

An outrageously comic novel documents a middle-aged writer and mother’s grappling with mid-life crisis—her husband’s and her own.

Preoccupied with her fledgling literary career, intent on the all-consuming consolations of philosophy, and scrambling to meet the demands of her four children, the acutely myopic and chronically inattentive Vita Glass doesn’t notice that her house and her marriage are competing to see which can fall apart fastest. She can barely find time for her writing career, and just when her newfound success in vegetable erotica is beginning to take off. Our heroine’s only tried and trusted escape is the blissful detachment of Keith’s hairdressing salon, but when her husband leaves the country, unannounced, she decides to do likewise—in the opposite direction, and with their children. Drawn from the pages of Vita’s journal, this outrageously comic novel documents Vita’s passage through a mid-life crisis and explores all the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

ABOUT PAULINE HOLDSTOCK

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Scotia Bank Giller prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her historical novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. The Hunter and the Wild Girl won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. Pauline lives just outside Victoria on Vancouver Island.

Events

Vancouver Double Launch: DECADENCE and WHAT ENDURES

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Join the fine folks at Upstart & Crow for the launch party of two Biblioasis books: Decadence by Richard Kelly Kemick and What Endures by Pauline Holdstock! This will be a night of joyful readings and conversation between the two authors. Books will be on hand for sale and signing.

This event is free, but capacity is limited, so please RSVP here!

Get Decadence here!

Get What Endures here!

ABOUT DECADENCE

“The genre of memoir is bullshit (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag’s triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative.”—Richard Kelly Kemick

In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life—quiet and desperate as it may at times be—worth celebrating.

ABOUT RICHARD KELLY KEMICK

Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His debut collection of short stories, Hello, Horse, was published by Biblioasis in 2024. He is also the author of I Am Herod (available on audiobook), the poetry collection Caribou Run, and the stage play Amor De Cosmos: A Delusional Musical. Richard’s limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan.

ABOUT WHAT ENDURES 

“Funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat.”—Mark Anthony Jarman

The stories in What Endures range through and respond to a clickbait world evolving at terrifying speed, revealing the absurd and ridiculous nature of everyday life. What does it mean to endure in a world starving for truth and connection, what makes life worth living, what can be discovered and preserved from the onrush of experience—vicarious and actual—that comes at us? With bracing wit, Pauline Holdstock’s stories move back and forth through time and circumstance to unpack what it is that saves us from despair, each of them pointing in their own magical way to that one, fragile thing that has the power to endure and to live on in others.

ABOUT PAULINE HOLDSTOCK

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. Her novels The Hunter and the Wild Girl and Confessions With Keith have each been awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.