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Literary Prizes

Zodiac Attack by Andrea Bishop

The Salt Spring Island, B.C., writer is on the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist

The Salt Spring Island, B.C., writer is on the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist

CBC Books ·
A woman with shoulder-length blonde hair smiling at the camera.
Andrea Bishop is a writer living in Salt Spring Island, B.C. (Belle Ancell)

Andrea Bishop has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Zodiac Attack. 

The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and their work will be published on CBC Books. The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on April 10, and the winner will be announced on April 17. 

If you're interested in other CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1.

The 2026 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January. 

About Andrea Bishop  

Andrea Bishop lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C. Her short stories have been published in Grain, The Fiddlehead, trampset, The Masters Review, Cleaver, Exile Editions CVC Anthology #10 and elsewhere. Bishop is a morning person who has a deep respect for forests, dogs, quests and spreadsheets. When not writing, she works as a health care management consultant. Bishop is grateful for support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Entry in five-ish words

"A boy charts unknown waters."

The short story's source of inspiration

"Although it's only tangentially related to the final version, when I first drafted Zodiac Attack I was thinking about the female Tahlequah, or J35, one of only 73 orcas remaining in the southern resident population, who swam carrying her dead calf for 17 days in 2018. I was reflecting on how life is increasingly difficult for these killer whales with the reduction in food resources, especially salmon, as well as the growth in ocean traffic that causes noise pollution which makes it hard to hunt prey and includes harassment from whale watching tours. That led me to thinking about how parenting can be hard for any species and how being a kid can be hard too. You don't quite know what's going on, but you still have important choices to make. And I was thinking about how most of us start out hardwired to be empathetic, but then sometimes we're taught to lean away from that. And all that thinking kind of swirled together into this story, which I revised and revised and revised."

First lines

Aiden would have refused the tour because his mom said chasing whales was cruel, and any self-respecting eight-year-old knew a dad bribe when he saw one, if only he'd had sea otters at home. At home there were squirrels and bunnies, occasionally skunks, porcupines, groundhogs. But no sea otters. He'd watched them on YouTube, bobbing on their little backs, holding hands and carrying shells.

Check out the rest of the longlist

The longlist was selected from more than 2,300 entries. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list. 

The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie. 

The complete list is: 

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