Angel or the Devil by Erin Bergman
2025 finalist: Grades 10 to 12 category
Angel or the Devil by Erin Bergman is a finalist in the 2025 First Page student writing challenge in the Grades 10 to 12 category.
Students across Canada wrote the first page of a novel set 150 years in the future, imagining how a current-day trend or issue has played out. About 1,000 students submitted their stories.
The shortlist was selected by a team of expert CBC readers. The winners will be selected by YA writer S.K. Ali and be announced on June 12.
Bergman, 18, a student at McNally High School in Edmonton, writes about religious extremism and medical disinformation.
The ship came every year in springtime, after the snow melted but before the ground had softened enough to bury our dead. The travellers gave away goods that came straight out of a fairytale, vibrant red candies and glass frames that cured blurry vision. Their accents were almost musical, their hands untouched by hard work; with the exception of those over sixty, whose skin was riddled with pockmarks left by the flu.
They took children like me aside, children with no parents, and told us that they could put us with loving families and give us vaccines to prevent us from succumbing to the same fate as our parents. I felt indignant about this; everyone knew that those who got sick were meant to be taken by God. Then again, the promise of a family felt so tempting it hurt. No matter how hard I tried, I still couldn't understand why my mother was taken from me.
At night, when the travellers returned to their ship, we gathered in an old steepled church and kneeled on the floor; the pews had been ripped out for firewood during the dark days of the flu. A preacher stood before us and chanted "God's gifts come wrapped in the Devil's temptations" until it felt like we had fallen into a trance. He told us that the pockmarks on the older travellers' skin were proof that they had made a deal with the Devil; all those who got sick with the flu were destined to die.
I nodded along, relieved that the garish pustules and slow, slow death that swept through my household last year were all for a reason.
In the morning, I felt too uneasy about the travellers' lies to visit them again. Instead I took the winding path to the cemetery, a simple plot marked by rows of bleach-white crosses. I walked towards my parents' grave, but stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the woman kneeling in front of it.
Even from behind she was unmistakable, auburn hair that shone like a halo in the light and a tattered shawl she used to wrap around me when I got cold. When she turned, her face was exactly as I'd remembered, except for a smattering of pockmarks across her skin.
I froze, caught between running into her arms and running back to the village.
"Mom?" I asked. "Is that you?"
About The First Page student writing challenge
CBC Books asked students to give us a glimpse of the great Canadian novel of the year 2175. They wrote the first page of a book set 150 years in the future, with the protagonist facing an issue that's topical today and set the scene for how it's all playing out in a century and a half.
Two winning entries — one from the Grades 7 to 9 category and one from the Grades 10 to 12 category — will be chosen by bestselling YA author S.K. Ali.
Her books include the YA novels Saints and Misfits, Love from A to Z and Love from Mecca to Medina. She has also ventured into children's books with her picture book The Proudest Blue and the middle-grade anthology she co-edited, Once Upon an Eid which won the Middle East Book Honor Award in 2020.
Her latest novel explores a different genre to everything she has done before — dystopian science fiction. In Fledgling: The Keeper's Records of Revolution, the first of a YA duology, two Earths are on the brink of self destruction.
Winners will receive...
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A one-year subscription to OwlCrate, which sends fresh boxes of books to young readers across Canada on a monthly basis.
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50 free YA books for their school library
You can read the complete rules and regulations here.
Last year's winners were Toronto's Anya Thadani in the Grades 7 to 9 category for Fixed and Kleefeld, Man's Hayley Peters in the Grades 10 to 12 for Forbidden Realities.
The winner will be announced on CBC Books on June 12, 2025.
