Stopwatch Gang member honoured
Essay collection ‘taut with wit and humanity’
VICTORIA His tales of battling addiction, the painful struggle of prison life and the separation from friends and family have earned one of Canada’s most notorious bank robbers a literary prize worth $5,000.
Stephen Reid was a member of the Stopwatch Gang, which hauled in $15 million while robbing about 100 banks in Canada and the United States during the 1970s and ’80s.
He is serving an 18-year sentence at the William Head Institution on southern Vancouver Island for a 1999 bank robbery and shootout with police in Victoria.
The spotlight was back on Reid Wednesday night, when he was awarded the 2013 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for his collection of essays, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden: Writing from Prison.
“When he called me tonight, he said, ‘It was my best jury decision ever’,” said Susan Musgrave, an acclaimed Canadian writer and Reid’s wife of 27 years. “He always has the best one-liners.”
The three-member jury praised Reid’s work as a “prison ethnography taut with wit and humanity.”
Musgrave said Reid told her that he learned of the award Thursday at noon when he visited the William Head library and read a newspaper.
Al Forrie, owner of the Saskatchewan-based Thistledown Press, which published the book, accepted the award for Reid.
“(The book) goes beyond the intent of prison memoir and exploitation and Hollywood movie kind off stuff,” said Forrie. “I mean this is a book of deepness, of darkness, of kind of an unbalanced grace, and very few people could have written this, except somebody who has this experience, and has the skills set to be able to transfer it.”