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, have announced the finalists for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize.
The finalists are:
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Me Against Jim Bailey by Susanna Cupido (Sackville, N.B.)
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Desire Path by Jeremy Elder (Toronto)
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Dinner With Friends by Nancy Hui Sulaiman (Windsor, Ont.)
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Nesting Season by Anna Ling Kaye (Vancouver)
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Beneath the Softness of Snow by Chanel M. Sutherland (Montreal)
The stories were selected from over 2,300 entries received from across Canada. The public can read the shortlisted stories on cbcooks.ca. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Thursday, April 28.
The 2022 CBC Short Story jurors are Omar El Akkad, Casey Plett and David Bergen.
Omar El Akkad has written for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde and Guernica. His debut novel, American War, was translated into 13 languages and won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. The New York Times and the Washington Post featured the 2017 novel on their respective “best book of the year” lists, and it was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. American War was defended by Tahmoh Penikett on CANADA READS 2018. El Akkad’s most recent novel, What Strange Paradise, won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was championed by Tareq Hadhad on CANADA READS 2022.
Casey Plett’s novel Little Fish won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Award for best transgender fiction. Her short story collection, A Safe Girl to Love, also won a Lambda Literary Award. She is the co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. Plett was awarded an Honour of Distinction from The Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. Her most recent book is the short story collection A Dream of a Woman, which was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
David Bergen has authored 10 novels and two collections of short stories. His works include The Time in Between, which won the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Matter with Morris, which received the International Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and The Age of Hope, which was defended by Ron MacLean on Canada Reads 2013. His short fiction collection Here the Dark was a finalist for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. He won the 1999 CBC Short Story Prize for How can men share a bottle of vodka and his latest novel, Out of Mind, was published in fall 2021.
In addition to a cash prize of $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Grand Prize winner will receive a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be published on the CBC Books website. The four other finalists will each receive $1000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and will be published on CBC Books.
Visit cbcbooks.ca for the complete CBC Short Story Prize longlist or for more information on the CBC Literary Prizes.
