20 April 2006
John Terpstra Shortlisted for
BC Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that John Terpstra’s The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter (Gaspereau Press, 2005) has been shortlisted for the second annual British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. BC Premier Gordon Campbell and Keith Mitchell, chair of the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, announced the shortlist yesterday in Vancouver. Fellow nominees are Rebecca Godfrey for Under the Bridge (HarperCollins), J.B. MacKinnon for Dead Man in Paradise (Douglas & McIntyre) and John Vaillant for The Golden Spruce (Knopf Canada).

The British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction is awarded by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, which was endowed by the province of British Columbia in 2003 to celebrate arts, humanities and community service. The $25,000 prize – one of the country’s largest literary awards – recognizes and celebrates Canada’s finest writers of literary non-fiction. This year’s winner will be announced 26 May 2006 at a ceremony in Vancouver. For more information about the prize, please visit www.bcachievement.com

BACKGROUND
In The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter acclaimed author John Terpstra tells the story of his wife’s family and the short lives of her three brothers, each of whom lived with muscular dystrophy until their early twenties. With humour, reverence and great love, Terpstra charts the experience of a family under unusual, but resoundingly human, circumstances. The Boys honours the last year in the lives of three brothers – Neil, Paul and Eric – whose days could never rightly be called wasted or tragic, but whose time on earth was all too brief. Terpstra celebrates life and challenges the brackets we place around lives characterized by illness. This book was also nominated for the prestigious Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Alberta Book Award for fiction and numerous Alcuin Awards for excellence in book design.

For more information contact
Beth Crosby at Gaspereau Press
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002, info@gaspereau.com