Dr. Gregory Betts has won the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia for his book Finding Nothing: the VanGardes, 1959-1975. The $2,500 prize, given by UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society, will be awarded at a reception to be held in April.
Published by University of Toronto Press, Dr. Betts’ book is an incisively written, compellingly argued, and wide-ranging look at Vancouver’s cultural life from 1959 to 1975. Through this book, Dr. Betts advances a strong claim that Vancouver was a key site for the cultural transformations spreading across English Canada at that time.
“The years I spent working on this book were delightfully rich. I visited archives and bookshops, met with scholars and writers, as well as people who just lived in the city during the period. What I found was a rich set of memories and jaw-dropping art and literature. What I found surprising and striking, however, was how different everyone’s take was on the story of the ’60s in Vancouver,” says Dr. Betts. “I obviously left more on the cutting floor than in the book, but I decided to focus almost exclusively on the writing. I say ‘almost’ because the avant-garde writing of the period was so consciously interdisciplinary, pushing new boundaries, and creating new spaces for intersections of art and life that all manner of other disciplines inevitably intersect. Writing and what it meant to be a writer changed over the years of this book, and I wanted my project to reflect the dynamic nature of the community at the time. Indeed, my hope is that this book makes it easier for others to delve into the wealth of world-shifting work that emerged in Vancouver during those years.”
“The story laid out in this book, which is at once coherent and many-dimensioned, represents a huge volume of research material that has been thoroughly examined and analyzed,” says Dr. Susan E. Parker, UBC’s University Librarian. “The book models what deft handling of complicated subject matter and materials should be. We are pleased to recognize Dr. Betts’ book with the Basil’ Stuart-Stubbs Prize.”
Dr. Betts is a poet, editor, essayist and professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto, he has taught literature at four different universities in Canada and Germany. He has published five books of poetry, edited five books of experimental Canadian writing, including Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations. He is currently President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English.
The book is available to read through UBC Library.
Shortlisted titles for the prize are:
Becoming Vancouver: a History, Daniel Francis. (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing).
A Long Way to Paradise: a New History of British Columbia Politics, Robert A. J. McDonald. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).
About the Prize
The Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Book on British Columbia, sponsored by UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society, recognizes the best scholarly book published by a Canadian author on a B.C. subject. The book prize was established in memory of Basil Stuart-Stubbs, a bibliophile, scholar and librarian who passed away in 2012. Stuart-Stubbs’s many accomplishments included serving as the University Librarian at UBC Library and as the Director of UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. Stuart-Stubbs had a leadership role in many national and regional library and publishing activities. During his exceptional career, he took particular interest in the production and distribution of Canadian books and was associated with several initiatives beneficial to authors and their readers, and to Canadian publishing.
Credentials of the writers are interesting, but really to get me excited about this book, you’d need to provide a few excerpts and let us know which artists and their works are being focused on or highlighted. Would love to have more details before considering a purchase.
Hi Anna, Thank you very much for your interest in the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Book Prize and this year’s winning book. You can find more detailed info about the book on the publisher’s website, including excerpts.