Tom Stewart (at right) has won The Whistler Independent Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, Immortal North (Lucky Dollar Media $23.99). The story follows a man, known as "the trapper," and his son navigating a rugged life in a remote forest in the North. They face familiar threats in the wilderness, such as harsh weather, predators and the intrusion of civilization at odds with their lifestyle. One day, their woodland life is shattered prompting a quest for justice. This suspenseful narrative explores the bonds of human love while grappling with the dueling forces of life: joy and suffering, good and evil, and compassion and vengeance. In the words of the Whistler Independent Book Awards judges for the fiction category, Darcie Friesen Hossack and Amber Cowie, “. . . the story of a northern fur trapper and his young son is all at once philosophical and contemplative, stark, gentle, lyrical, brutal and astonishingly full of the mysteries of love, life, fatherhood, and the natural world . . . Tom Stewart is an author who knows how to colour a world out of the dark.”

Stewart, who has never taken a writing course, says of himself: “I am a university drop-out turned fishing and hunting guide, bush-plane pilot, and poker player." He was also the finalist in the 2022 Chanticleer International Book Awards for Literary Fiction and the 2022 Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book. Stewart grew up near Winnipeg and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Manitoba. He now lives in Tofino.

BOOKS:

Under Big-Hearted Skies: A Young Man's Memoir of Adventure, Wilderness, & Love (Lucky Dollar Media, 2020) $17.99 9781777221102

Immortal North: A Novel (Lucky Dollar, 2022) $24.99 9781777221126

Immortal North Two (Lucky Dollar, 2023) $24.99 9781777221157

Tofino: A Novel (Lucky Dollar, 2025) $22.99 9781777221195

[BCBW 2026]