Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe to judge 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize
The winner will receive $6,000, a writing residency and have their work published on CBC Books
Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe will judge the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
The CBC Nonfiction Prize recognizes original, unpublished nonfiction that is up to 2,000 words in length.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 have their work published on CBC Books.
Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is open for submissions until March 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET.
Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for 25 years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over 14 years. Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. She was named by CBC Books in 2020 as a writer to watch.
Her debut novel, Five Little Indians, won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It also won Canada Reads 2022, when it was championed by Ojibway fashion journalist Christian Allaire, and was the #1 bestselling Canadian book at independent bookstores across Canada in both 2021 and 2022.
Good's latest book is Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada, a collection of seven personal essays that explore a wide range of issues affecting Indigenous people in Canada today, including reconciliation, the rise of Indigenous literature in the 1970s and the impact it has to this day, the emergence of "pretendians" and more. Truth Telling was shortlisted for the Writers Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Writing and was named one of the best Canadian nonfiction books of 2023 by CBC Books.
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.
Sharpe is a Toronto-based writer, professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. Her previous book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Guardian and was a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
Ordinary Notes explores the complexities of Black life and loss through a series of 248 notes which intertwine past and present realities. Sharpe writes of the influence of her mother, Ida Wright Sharpe and combines multiple voices on the many ways to experience Blackness. Ordinary Notes won the Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Awards for Nonfiction and was named one of the best Canadian nonfiction books of 2023 by CBC Books.
The jury will select the shortlist and winner. A panel of established writers and editors from across Canada review the submissions and will determine the longlist from all the submissions. The longlist, shortlist and winner will be announced in fall 2024.
Last year's winner was B.C. writer Louie Leyson for their piece Glossary for an Aswang.
The CBC Literary Prizes have been recognizing Canadian writers since 1979. Past winners include David Bergen, Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields and Michael Winter.
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If you're looking to submit to the Prix du récit Radio-Canada, you can enter here.
The 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April and the CBC Short Story Prize will open in September.
