CBC Books, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partner the Canada Council for the Arts, have announced the finalists for the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize.
The finalists are:
- Dear M by Clara Chalmers (West Vancouver)
- Eel Broth for Growing Children by Helen Han Wei Luo (Vancouver)
- Just a Howl by Will Richter (Vancouver)
- Marriage by Nicholas Ruddock (Guelph, Ont.)
- Bird Emergent by Katie Welch (Kamloops, B.C.)
The stories were selected from more than 2,300 entries received from across Canada. The public can read the shortlisted stories on cbcbooks.ca. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Tuesday, April 18.
The 2023 CBC Short Story Prize jurors are Kim Fu, Norma Dunning and Steven Price.
Kim Fu is the author of the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, which is on the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. Fu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, BOMB, Hazlitt and the TLS. Born in Calgary and raised in Vancouver, Fu now lives in Seattle.
Norma Dunning is an Inuk writer as well as a scholar, researcher, professor and grandmother. Her latest short story collection, Tainna: The Unseen Ones, won the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Her previous short story collection, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Howard O’Hagan Award for short stories and the Bronze Foreword Indies Award for short stories. Her next book, Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother, was published last fall. Dunning lives in Edmonton.
Steven Price is the author of Lampedusa, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the B.C. Book Prize. His previous novels include By Gaslight, which was longlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Into that Darkness. He has also written two poetry books, Anatomy of Keys, which won the Gerald Lampert Award, and Omens in the Year of the Ox, which won the ReLit Award. He is also the author of historical fantasy Ordinary Monsters, written under the name J M Miro.
In addition to a cash prize of $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Grand Prize winner will have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point 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.
