Craigie gets the Ryga Award

Book jacket of Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis by Gregor Craigie

Victoria’s Gregor Craigie has won the George Ryga Award, an annual literary prize for a BC writer who has achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness in a new book, for his title Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis (Random House Canada $25).

Craigie amassed a remarkable body of research through years of gathering data and information, and conducting interviews with people across Canada and other countries about the crisis in housing. In his engaging and readable book, Craigie gets to the heart of daily life struggles for affordable shelter in his thoughtful and compelling stories, depicting the hardships of many. He also delivers a large number of concrete evidence-based solutions from cities and jurisdictions around the world.

“This is a necessary book for our times,” said the judges. “Every elected government official and member of municipal and regional Planning Departments in the nation should be presented with a copy. There’d be no more excuse for trifling on the issue while another generation is dispossessed of the chance to have a decent piece of roof over its collective head.”

The award will be celebrated along with the George Woodcock Award at the Vancouver Public Library at 350 West Georgia Street in Vancouver on June 20, 4:30 – 6 pm.

The runners-up for the 2025 George Ryga Award are: Jim Reynolds for Canada and Colonialism: An Unfinished History (UBC Press); David Spaner for Keefer Street (Ronsdale Press); Pat Dobie for The Tenants (Anvil); Zehra Naqvi for The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose (McClelland & Stewart); and David Geselbracht for Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis (D&M.)

This article was originally published in BCBookLook, on April 15, 2025: https://bcbooklook.com/craigie-gets-the-ryga-award/