UVic Writing Student Wins Journey Prize

University of Victoria master’s student Yasuko Thanh is the winner of one of Canada’s top literary awards for new writers.
         Thanh won this year’s $10,000 Journey Prize award for Floating like the Dead, a fictional account of life on D’Arcy Island, a tiny islet near Victoria that was used as an isolated, segregated colony for people with leprosy. Forty-nine people in total, all men, and all but one Chinese, were shipped to the leper colony from 1891 to 1924.
         “The first time I heard about D’Arcy Island, I almost didn't believe it,” recalls Thanh. “I couldn't imagine that I had grown up on the West Coast without even knowing of its existence. So I went to look it up in the BC history books I had on my bookshelf, and it wasn't even mentioned. This is the part that really got me going. How could this have happened, how could these people have lived and died, under those circumstances, and there not even be a sanitized version? The best response to the story I've had so far was written by a woman of Chinese Canadian descent who had also never previously heard of D'Arcy Island. She said that reading the story made her want to go and do her own research on the topic. I thought this was awesome.”
         Thanh’s story originally appeared in the Vancouver Review, which receives $2,000 for her win. She chose to spend part of her award on a girl's scholarship in Africa, a library in a box, and literacy training for two women through Plan Canada.
         The 2009 Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize is the most significant monetary award given in Canada to a writer at the beginning of her career for a short story or excerpt from a fiction work-in-progress.
 

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