5 writers make the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist
The winner will receive $6,000, attend a writing residency. Read the five stories now!
Five writers from across Canada have made the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist.
The finalists are:
- Dear M by Clara Chalmers (Vancouver)
- Eel Broth for Growing Children by Helen Han Wei Luo (Vancouver)
- Just a Howl by Will Richter (Vancouver)
- Marriage by Nicholas Ruddock (Guelph, Ont.)
- Bird Emergent by Katie Welch (Kamloops, B.C.)
The winner will be announced on April 18. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and attend a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point.
The remaining four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.
All five finalists had their work published on CBC Books. You can read their stories by clicking on the links above.
This year's finalists were selected by a jury comprised of Kim Fu, Norma Dunning and Steven Price. They will also select the winner.
The longlist was compiled by a team of 12 writers from across Canada. There were more than 2,300 English-language submissions.
The shortlist for the French-language competition has also been revealed. To read more, go to the Prix de la nouvelle Radio-Canada.
Last year's winner was Montreal writer Chanel M. Sutherland for her story Beneath the Softness of Snow.
If you're interested in other writing competitions, check out the CBC Literary Prizes. The 2023 CBC Poetry Prize is currently open and the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September.
Get to know the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize English-language finalists below.
Dear M by Clara Chalmers
Clara Chalmers is a King's College London dropout and ex-perfectionist. She writes profusely but often in secret. Her laptop is littered with poems, short stories and the corpses of abandoned novels. As she sheds her perfectionist tendencies, she hopes some of her words will escape into the open and impact a wider audience.
Currently, Clara is sailing around the Caribbean on a 88-foot schooner, crewed by 16 other students, many of which had never set foot on a sailboat before. Amidst sweating sails, scrubbing the scuppers or baking cookies in a cramped galley, Clara is writing down all she observes.
The pandemic made me reflect on health, healthcare and how choices concerning our own well-being impact others.- Clara Chalmers
Why she wrote Dear M: "The pandemic made me reflect on health, healthcare and how choices concerning our own well-being impact others. This is a divisive topic and, in the past several years, I have witnessed people grow frustrated with one another against a backdrop of vaccinations, oscillating COVID restrictions, protests, policy changes and deep feelings of isolation. Some members of my immediate family grew very sick in this period and I got to spend a bit of time in the hospital as a visitor. These observations are what inspired my story.
"Rather than writing from a place of anger and blame, I wanted to adopt the perspective of someone with an unorthodox view of healthcare. Many of the characters are composites of members of my own family. You can read it as satire, a compassionate peak into the mind of a contrarian, epistolary fiction, a series of vignettes told by unreliable narrator, etc. Because the scope of the narrative is so small, it is meant to take whatever shape you, as the reader, would like it to."
Eel Broth for Growing Children by Helen Han Wei Luo
Helen Han Wei Luo is a writer, artist and philosophy PhD student at Columbia University. She holds a BA in political science from Simon Fraser University and an MA in philosophy from the University of British Columbia. Her poem Consider the Peony appears in the Best of Canadian Poetry 2023 anthology. She is currently working on a novella titled Elegy for Daji, a radical feminist retelling of Shang dynasty Chinese mythology. In Vancouver, she paints hummingbirds, tunes violins, touches trees. In New York, she photographs flamboyant subway rats. She previously made the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Aranaj, the Fishmonger Who Wept for the Fish and she was also on the 2016 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Character.
This story is about the universality of loving under hardship: the limits, the brutality, the magic.- Helen Han Wei Luo
Why she wrote Eel Broth for Growing Children: "During the first months of the pandemic, I was embarrassed to admit that I was from Wuhan. Though I immigrated with my family to Vancouver at a very young age, I have a lot of formative memories associated with the city. In many ways, this story is about honouring those little memory fragments: the rickety wooden benches in communal kitchens, the harsh tonality of the rural Wuhanese dialect, the bicycle my mother used to take me to school on. But in Canada, as incidents of Sinophobia escalated, I was afraid of being associated with the city that had originated the pandemic, and angered at the racialized associations of Wuhan being dirty, uncivilized, othered. I was especially unhappy with the Western world's misconceptions about Asian food practices. I had been very loved in Wuhan, and ate from very loving hands. So this story is about the universality of loving under hardship: the limits, the brutality, the magic."
Just a Howl by Will Richter
Will Richter is a writer living in Vancouver. Stories of his have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary magazines in Canada and the U.S., including Arts & Letters, The Fiddlehead, Fiction International, subTerrain, The Threepenny Review and Witness. Will has also written and collaborated on several comic shorts for Rogue Wave Comics, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. He's currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. He previously made the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Proverbs of the Lesser and was also longlisted in 2019 for his story At a Distance.
I wrote the story around the time of the Salman Rushdie stabbing. Although the scenario in my story is quite different from that one in many ways, the Rushdie attack was very much on my mind.- Will Richter
Why he wrote Just a Howl: "I wrote the story around the time of the Salman Rushdie stabbing. Although the scenario in my story is quite different from that one in many ways, the Rushdie attack was very much on my mind. And, of course, pointless violence of all kinds is constantly in the news. For the last few years submitting a story to the CBC competition has become an annual ritual, and I wrote this one specifically for it."
Marriage by Nicholas Ruddock
Nicholas Ruddock is a physician and writer who has worked in Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, Yukon and Ontario. Has had novels, short stories, poetry published since 2002 in Canada, U.K., Ireland and Germany. He is married to the artist Cheryl Ruddock, with four children. He is the author of the 2021 novel Last Hummingbird of West Chile and previously made the 2016 CBC Poery Prize longlist for Storm as well as the 2016 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for The Hummingbirds.
I like deadlines and I like the CBC.- Nicholas Ruddock
The inspiration for Marriage, was mostly worry about the next generation, he told CBC Books.
Why he wrote Marriage: "I submit to the CBC Literary Prizes regularly. I like deadlines and I like the CBC."
Bird Emergent by Katie Welch
Katie Welch writes fiction and teaches music in Kamloops, B.C. Her debut novel, Mad Honey, is a 2023 OLA Evergreen Prize nominee. She grew up in Ottawa and holds a BA in English literature from the University of Toronto. Her short stories have been published in Event Magazine, Prairie Fire, the Antigonish Review, the Temz Review, the Quarantine Review and elsewhere. She was first runner-up in UBCO's 2019 Short Story Contest, and her story Poisoned Apple was chosen as Pick-of-the-Week by Longform Fiction. She is currently working on her next novel.
I wanted to explore characters whose trajectory takes them from sublimating their inner natures through discovering and becoming aligned with their real strengths and motivations.- Katie Welch
Why she wrote Bird Emergent: "I write short stories to work on craft. Prize competitions are great opportunities to submit, and this Canadian contest has a long history and some fabulous winners. Barriers to embracing our true selves are falling, yet many still exist. I wanted to explore characters whose trajectory takes them from sublimating their inner natures through discovering and becoming aligned with their real strengths and motivations. While considering this topic, I thought about a series of short films written and co-directed by Isabella Rossellini called Seduce Me. Scientifically accurate and brilliantly imagined with low-tech costumes and hilarious scripts, the films explore the seduction and reproduction rituals of various animals. I recalled the duck film in particular, and the idea of overcoming obstacles to become fully realized merged with the memory of a cinematic duck sex explanation."
