Travis Lupick is the 2018 recipient of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature for his book, Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle With Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press).
The longlist announcement on February 15 included 7 BC-published titles. The George Ryga Award is annually presented to a BC writer who has achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness in a new book published in the preceding calendar year.
Fighting for Space is the story of a grassroots group of addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and activists Ann Livingston of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and Liz Evans of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS), who waged a political street fight in the 1990s and 2000s to change how the city treats its most marginalized citizens. These activists fought for harm reduction, mental health support, and aided in opening Insite, North America’s first supervised-injection facility.
“I hope that Fighting for Space receiving this award encourages discussion of Canada’s overdose epidemic,” Lupic said in a statement. “I worry that public attention is beginning to wane, or that a feeling of hopelessness is leading people to block the crisis from their minds. But the number of deaths remains higher than ever.
“In 1998, the worst year of the overdose crisis that’s recounted in Fighting for Space, there were 400 drug-overdose deaths across BC. It was a number so high that in response, Vancouver revolutionized how it responds to addiction. In 2017, there were 1,436 fatal overdoses across BC. Something needs to change, and radically so.”
The George Ryga Award is sponsored by Pacific BookWorld News Society, Yosef Wosk, and Vancouver Public Library. The 14th annual George Ryga Award will be presented at a ceremony on June 28 at the Vancouver Public Library.
One reply on “Travis Lupick’s Fighting for Space wins George Ryga Award 2018”
Travis, this is what the city said…….“The Empty Homes Tax (also known as the Vacancy Tax) was developed to help relieve pressure on Vancouver’s rental housing market, by returning empty or under-utilized properties to the long-term rental market,” the release reads. “Revenue generated by the tax is required to be used for affordable housing initiatives in Vancouver.”
City council wants to help renters yet the multi million dollar homes they want rented out are unaffordable to most people. In addition, their plan to use $38 million for some future “affordable housing ” which will take years to complete does nothing to help renters. The “affordable” rents established by the city for developers starts at $1800/mo for about 400 sq ft. So what is their criteria for affordable housing? Instead of attempting to download the social responsibility of supporting low income renters onto landlords why don’t they use the $38 million to help renters today. With $38 million they could assist 15,833 low income renters for $200/month for the entire year. They should be lobbying the provincial government to match and committing to use these monies to support renters rather than suggesting they will use it to support developers to build fictitious “affordable” housing that is not really affordable