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 Aldona Dziedziejko of Rocky Mountain House, Alta. as the winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Dziedziejko’s essay, Ice Safety Chart: Fragments, was selected from more than 1,400 entries.
As the grand-prize winner, Dziedziejko will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and her work has been published on CBC Books. Dziedziejko will discuss her winning essay on Bookends with Mattea Roach. The interview will air Oct. 6 on CBC Radio.
The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize jurors Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe, said this about Dziedziejko’s essay:
“With unflinching directness, evocative prose, and an ambitious structure, Ice Safety Chart: Fragments draws readers into a narrative of loss and place that plays out across unsteady terrain. This is a world where ‘geography is a foreign text,’ which eludes every effort to take shortcuts towards real understanding, and where true self-knowledge builds as slowly and inexorably as the permafrost. Through the intersecting stories of a woman’s suicide by exposure to the Arctic wilderness, the long and brutal history of Inuit repression and genocide at the hands of the Canadian state, and a heartwrenching personal tragedy, Ice Safety Chart: Fragments explores loss as a starting point rather than an end unto itself. In doing so, the piece paints the land as inextricably tied to loss: it is where it happens, it is the place to which we flee after we experience it, and it is the canvas which transforms loss into a deeper kind of knowledge. In this concise and complex work, the mysteries of the Arctic wilderness become spiritually transformative, the cold becomes a source of support, and the ice, in all its seasons, thicknesses, and variegated forms, becomes a stabilizing force that holds the world—and a person—together. Ice Safety Chart: Fragments is an uncommon accomplishment: experimental and beautifully written, it guides readers to the revelation that the landscape of ice isn’t empty, it is many landscapes haunted and living and perhaps also, a pathway back to self.”
Aldona Dziedziejko said, “I was awash with disbelief and surprise. The first words out of my mouth were ‘Are you kidding me?’ This is an honour that I am lucky to share with many writers I admire and it’s such a wonderful community to be a part of. I write in order to communicate— to reach out to the wide world of readers out there and I’m so glad that through this prize I will get to do this on a vast scale. Winning the CBC Nonfiction prize has finally made me validate my identity as a writer. Most importantly, I am grateful to the jury for understanding what I was trying to say, and for the opportunities that this recognition will allow to help me finish my writing projects.”
The four runners-up for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize, who will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, are: Ted Bishop of Edmonton for On Not Knowing Cree; Alison Pick of Toronto for Not in Their Names; Evelyn N. Pollock of Coldwater, Ont. for Is Life a Tossed Salad? and Emi Sasagawa of Vancouver for Dad’s the Word.
The winner of the Prix du récit Radio-Canada 2024 was also announced: Pascale Millot for Variante de la normale. More information is available at ICI.Radio-canada.ca/icionlit.
For more information on the CBC Literary Prizes, please visit CBCBooks.ca.
