Saturday, May 10 at 6 PM at Laurel Building in downtown Kelowna, the winners of the Okanagan Short Story Contest will be announced. Judge John Gould will give a reading and present the prizes to the three winners.A few weeks ago, the finalists for the 2008 Okanagan Short Story Contest were announced. Of 159 entries, the following 10 writers made it to the final stage of the judging process:
- Susan Buis of Kamloops
- Jan Crerar of Salmon Arm
- Brian d’Eon of Nelson
- Karen Hofmann of Kamloops
- Ashley Little of Kelowna
- Dawn Kennedy of Vernon
- Patrick Roscoe of Keremeos
- Sharon Taylor of Williams Lake
- Lorna Tureski of Armstrong
- Shelley Wood of Kelowna
First-prize winner will receive $500, second $200 and third $100. Winners and finalists will also receive chapbooks of the winning stories. Chapbooks will be for sale at the reading.John Gould is the author of two collections of very short stories, Kilter, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Giller Prize and won the Mary Scorer Award (for the best book by a Manitoba publisher), and The Kingdom of Heaven. His fiction has also appeared in chapbooks, and in periodicals across the country. He publishes occasional freelance nonfiction. John studied at the innovative Integrated Studies program at the University of Waterloo, where he holds a Bachelor degree. He has worked as an environmental researcher, a tree planter and a house framer. More recently he has turned to teaching fiction, and to coordinating arts programs. He co-created and ran the otherwords program at the BC Festival of the Arts, and is now the Executive Director of the Victoria School of Writing. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Malahat Review and teaches at the University of Victoria.The awards night and public reading announcing the three winners is being held during Kelowna’s Life and Arts Festival.Contest sponsors are UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, CBC Radio One, and the Central Okanagan Foundation. For more information, contact Nancy Holmes at UBC Okanagan, 250-807-9369, or visit http://www.okstorycontest.org