Patrick Lane won the $5,000 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for Red Dog, Red Dog, the first major win for the poet's debut novel. Earlier, his book had been short-listed for such prestigious awards as the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award, Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the B.C. Book Prize.

"It's an honour to be in the company of such fine writers," Lane said. "To be honoured by my own community is a special, special gift."

Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin and award co-sponsor Brian Butler made the presentation at a Union Club gala last night.

Lane's Red Dog, Red Dog is described as "an epic novel of unrequited dreams and forestalled lives." It is set in the mid-1950s, in a small town in the unnamed Okanagan Valley. The novel has garnered raves on both sides of the Atlantic.

As a poet, Lane received a Governor General's Award in 1979, plus two more nominations in the early 1990s. His memoir There Is a Season was short-listed for the 2005 B.C. Book Prize non-fiction award. In 2007, Lane's collective work earned him the Lieutenant Governor's Award for literary excellence.

The night's other winner was Penny Draper, whose book Graveyard of the Sea won the Bolen Books Children's Book Prize.

Mel Bolen presented the $5,000 prize to the author, who heads the textbook department at the University of Victoria's bookstore, leaving her just Saturday mornings for her own books and Times Colonist book reviews.

"Does this make me a real writer now?" she quipped.

Draper is the author of three children's books, all built around a child's involvement with a historically based Canadian disaster. Her first novel, Terror of Turtle Mountain, was set in 1903 at the Frank slide in Alberta.

In Graveyard of the Sea, the protagonist is 12-year-old Nell, who lives on a lighthouse off Vancouver Island during the 1906 sinking of the Valencia.

While her books have been nominated for several awards elsewhere, the Bolen Prize is Draper's first win.

Hal Wake, artistic director for the Vancouver International Writers Festival emceed the evening, with readings by all eight finalists, including Sarah N. Harvey, Julie Lawson, Dede Crane, David Leach, Ilana Stanger-Ross and Patricia Young.

City of Victoria Poet Laureate Linda Rogers opened the evening with a poem about the fragility of artistic freedom.

The winners and short-listed nominees were entertained at a pre-gala reception and given a night at the Magnolia Hotel and Spa and the Victoria Marriott Inner Harbour.

Jurors for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize were librarian Sandra Anderson, Marlyn Horsdal -- a publisher, editor and writer, and poet/novelist Brian Brett. Jurors for the Bolen Books Children's Book Prize were librarian and bookseller Thora Howell, librarian Andrea Brimmell and writer Bill Valgardson.

"Red Dog, Red Dog shines brightest in a shining shortlist of wonderful books," said juror Brian Brett. "Patrick Lane has written a feast of a novel. Lyric, ironic, beautiful and scary. Every sentence is a dish in the great dinner of an era that was lost and is lost no more."