This year's winning book for The George Ryga Award For Social Awareness in BC Writing and Publishing has been won by Talonbooks' In Plain Sight: Reflections On Life In Downtown Eastside Vancouver, edited by Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane.

Runner-up manuscripts were Stanley Park's Secret, by Jean Barman (Harbour Publishing) and Vanishing British Columbia, by Michael Kluckner (UBC Press and The University Of Washington Press).

In choosing In Plain Sight as this year's winner, internationally renowned journalist Myrna Kostash wrote, "We will never know the whole of the "real"; lives told in this book, but with exemplary honesty and a great deal of tenderness both toward their wounded sisters and brothers and themselves, the women of In Plain Sight have taken us into their confidence and given us a look. We owe them a debt of gratitude.";

Kostash goes on to make the connection, even, between these writers and Ryga himself: "When George Ryga imagined the life of an Aboriginal woman who, full of hope, comes to the city only to die on its Skid Row, he wrote The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. He brought her to the Canadian stage in 1967 in a powerful mix of song, dance, dialogue and montage, as though no single genre could contain her life. Rita Joe became, and remains, one of the emblematic characters of the twentieth-century Canadian literary and social imagination.";

"Forty years on, I think of her again, as I read with mounting admiration the chorus of voices, brought together and edited by Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane, which collectively narrate In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. And I think of George Ryga. Coming from poverty and hardship on a hard-scrabble farm in northern Alberta, self-taught, a writer who struggled to live both as an artist and a self-proclaimed "artist in resistance,"; I think Ryga would have liked nothing better than to sit down in an eastside café with any of these women - Laurie, Anne, Sara, Dee, Pawz, Black Widow, Tamara - and hear them out, just as we readers are able to do, who open this wonderful book. When Anne says, "I hope people learn that poverty and mental illness are just factors in people's lives, they don't define human beings,"; Ryga would have nodded in perfect solidarity.";

The Award will be presented to the writers and the publisher in a gala award ceremony, hosted by CBC's Paul Grant It will feature an award-winning performance of Portrait Of A Lady, with Dorian Kohl as Hagar Shipley from Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. This particular script was adapted from the novel for radio by George Ryga himself, and later provided with dramaturgy by Michael Cook and directed by Ken Smedley. The Gala Award Evening will take place in Vernon's Powerhouse Theatre on Thursday, July 27th. The winners will once again be presented with The Censor's Golden Rope, a unique piece of sculpture recreated annually by Armstrong sculptor Reg Kienast.

The George Ryga Award is sponsored by The George Ryga Centre, Okanagan College, BC BookWorld and CBC Radio One, Kelowna.