Dan Werb, juror for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize, wants you to experiment with your voice
The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is open for submissions until March 1, 2024
Dan Werb is a writer and social epidemiologist. He is the author of City of Omens, which was a finalist for a Governor General's Literary Award. Werb's writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Time and the Globe and Mail. He currently holds a dual appointment as assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and in the Division of Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego.
In 2022, Werb won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure. The Invisible Siege traces the history of the virus family and the scientists who went to war with it, as well as the lessons learned and lost during the SARS and MERS outbreaks. Werb argues there is no doubt coronaviruses will strike again and that understanding them is the best way to be prepared.
Werb was announced as a juror for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize alongside Michelle Good and Christina Sharpe.
The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is open for submissions until March 1, 2024. You can submit original, unpublished nonfiction that is up to 2,000 words in length. Nonfiction includes memoir, biography, humour writing, essay (including personal essay), travel writing and feature articles.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will have their work published on CBC Books.
Werb spoke with On the Go host Anthony Germain about his latest book The Invisible Siege and what he will be looking for in a great nonfiction entry.
Your book was super timely when it came out, as it was all about the pandemic. How do you take something like COVID and turn it into an interesting book?
The only way that I could do it was by starting with people. I was trying to tell a story. I looked at the kind of writing that was happening around the pandemic and it was almost universally negative. I wanted to write an optimistic counter narrative about what went right. And what went right was the scientific response, the development of vaccines, development of antivirals, things like that.
To tell that story, it meant focusing on the scientists who were behind that work, but not focusing them as scientists per se, but really as people — vulnerable, afraid, joyous, frustrated — and to chart their paths not only during COVID, but in the years and decades before to show how these little ground breaking, earth shattering innovations, the protection of millions of lives through vaccines and antivirals comes out of abstract scientific curiosity. That's how I approached it.
At the time, there was enough terrifying material being written about it, so I can see why you would approach it that way. And you won the Hillary Weston's Writers Trust prize, how important are literary prizes for writers?
Well, they can really get you to the next level, right? They can help you find new audiences. Writers are also notoriously thirsty for external validation. So there's that as well. You win a prize and you suddenly, for a couple days at least, feel like your writing is worth something.
I think it can open up a pathway through the writing world, which is often pretty murky, it's not totally clear how to move ahead there. These prizes can do that. The CBC Nonfiction Prize is primarily targeted for those who are just entering the writing world.
What do contests like this prize mean for new or aspiring writers or someone who's trying to become a writer?
I think if you're writing, you're already a writer. There's no becoming. I mean, we're all becoming what we're trying to do and also just being the thing itself at the same time.
I love this prize because it's for short work. It's just a few thousand words. It's also backed by the media infrastructure of the CBC, so there's a certain high profileness to it as well.
It's set up to help writers find readers and that's beautiful. It doesn't matter with this prize what your pedigree is, what you've done before, who you are, where you are. Honestly, even what you're writing about. It's really just about do you have a voice, do you have something to say? And I would just encourage people to apply.
Let me ask you this as a juror for this year's CBC Nonfiction Prize, what will you be looking for in the entries that you read and adjudicate?
I'm really interested, again because these are short pieces, I think we're going to see newer and emerging writers apply. I'm interested in seeing experimentation. I want to know what the next wave of Canadian writers is writing about, how they're writing. How they're shifting and moving the genre forward and what they're doing with prose, what they're doing with storytelling and just, you know, a high degree of experimentation.
That's what excites me, as well as prose and storytelling, that is just deeply emotionally resonant and I don't mean sad or dramatic or anything like that necessarily. I think it's just more about whether you can bring your readers into the space of your writing and hook them emotionally. I'm just so excited to discover those pieces.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
