The first poet to win the City of Vancouver Book Award was Downtown Eastside activist Bud Osborn for Keys to Kingdom in 1999. William New did it last year for his collection, YVR.

Now Brad Cran has a chance to become the third poet since 1989 to win that award, as well as its first two-time winner, with Ink on Paper (Nightwood Editions $18.95).
Cran first won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award for his non-fiction book Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (with Gillian Jerome), a social justice initiative, sold on streetcorners, that has reportedly raised $50,000 for marginalized people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

As a Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver from 2009 to 2011, Cran first made the news when his criticisms of the 2010 Olympics Games (in an essay called Notes on a World Class City) went viral on the internet, raising the hackles of Olympic organizers. His new volume of Vancouvercentric verse most notably contains his civic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Grey Whale and Ending with a Line from Rilke.

978-0-88971-281-2