Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

Long listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country‘s “very poorest forward sortation area of all 7,000 postal prefixes,” Bart Campbell dismantles our hard-held notions about poverty, the disenfranchised, substance abuse, and the nature of charity.

The Door Is Open is one man’s story of a transformative journey into the complicated and complex world of poverty.

Praise for The Door is Open

:

"The best recent book on the human face of this country's outcasts." (The Toronto Star)

"The human face of poverty that grips upward of 5 million Canadians is vividly portrayed in The Door Is Open" (Quill & Quire)

"my pick as the best non-fiction book published in 2001" (discorder)

Bart Campbell's essays about the downtown eastside of Vancouver and his experiences there as a soup kitchen volunteer have appeared on CBC's Morningside, and in Next City, True Life, Canadian Forum, and frequently in The Vancouver Review. A “non-fictional” excerpt from Bart's historic novel about the 4,000 Relief Camp Strikers who occupied Vancouver in the spring of 1935 appeared in Canadian Geographic Magazine, spring 2001. Bart lives in Vancouver and works as a medical laboratory technologist.

Bart Campbell's profile page

• Winner, City of Vancouver Book Prize
• Winner, BC Book Prize

"The best recent book on the human face of this country's outcasts." - The Toronto Star