CBC Books, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partners the Canada Council for the Arts and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, today announced Dorian McNamara of Halifax as the winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize. McNamara’s story, You (Streetcar at Night), was selected from more than 2,300 entries.
As the grand-prize winner, McNamara will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and his story has been published on CBC Books. McNamara will discuss his winning short story on Bookends with Mattea Roach. The interview will air at a later date on CBC Radio and CBC Listen.
The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize jurors Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie, said this about McNamara’s short story:
“From its opening lines, we were captivated by the deft and corporeal imagery of You (Streetcar at Night), with its lush descriptions of travelling via streetcar, and all the rhythm and music that one becomes enmeshed in along the way. But beyond its flowing narrative and lyrical writing, lay the story, and that is what called to us. You (Streetcar at Night) follows a trans man’s recollection of his first relationship, the narrative establishing itself as an address to his former partner, taking a novel route through aspects of transition. Highlighting the nuanced duality of a Before and After, connected through a frank and vulnerable interiority. It is a requiem of sorts, a call to the past, that simultaneously grounds itself in a present of acceptance and true belonging. Where one can look at a stranger on a streetcar and see a whole history in their eyes. This story resoundingly illustrates — at a time when it could not be more needed — that within everyone, outside of all our external features and presentations, is a prevailing interiority and humanity, and that trans people are not a threat.”
Dorian McNamara said, “Winning the CBC Short Story Prize is a monumental honour, one that still feels beyond me. Getting the news, I felt all the joy in my body well up in my throat, and I did not know whether I was laughing or crying. Writing for me is a practice of trying to understand and often making peace with my inability to do so, be it regarding myself or others. To be given the opportunity to share my writing with others, and to be understood and to even perhaps have my writing understand others is an incredible gift. I am so grateful for being given the chance to further my process and dedicate myself to my practice.”
The four runners-up for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize, who will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, are: Vincent Anioke of Waterloo, Ont. for Love is the Enemy; Trent Lewin of Waterloo, Ont. for Ghostworlds; Emi Sasagawa of Vancouver for Lessons from a peach and Zeina Sleiman of Edmonton for My Father’s Soil.
The winner of the Prix de la nouvelle Radio-Canada 2025 was also announced: Michel Trépanier for Le baiser des étoiles. More information is available at ICI.Radio-canada.ca/icionlit.
For more information on the CBC Literary Prizes, please visit CBCBooks.ca.
