Almost a year after receiving the Rogers Writers’ trust Prize for Fiction, Dear Evelyn was awarded the City of Victoria Butler Prize on October 9th 2019.
From Jane van Koeverden at CBC: Kathy Page’s novel Dear Evelyn has won the 2019 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, a $5,000 award given to the best book of fiction, nonfiction or poetry by an author from the Greater Victoria area.
The Victoria Children’s Book Prize, another $5,000 award, was given to Sterling, Best Dog Ever by Aidan Cassie.
Page’s historical novel tells the story of a marriage as it unravels over seven decades. Harry, a poetry lover, and Evelyn, the ambitious daughter of a drunk, get married shortly before Harry is deployed overseas during the Second World War.
The novel continues after the war’s end, as parenthood and career pressures widen the fissures in Harry and Evelyn’s uneasy marriage.
Dear Evelyn was inspired by the love letters Page’s father sent to her mother during the war.
“They were very passionate, emotional letters. I was struck by the huge distance between this beginning and where things had ended up in their 70-year-long marriage,” said Page in an interview with CBC Books in October 2018.
Page won the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Dear Evelyn.
Link to CBC content including “Kathy Page on how to write great fiction that’s based on real life.”