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Literary Prizes

Point of Origin by Alison Braid-Fernandez

The Summerland, B.C., writer is on the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist

The Summerland, B.C., writer is on the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist

CBC Books ·
A woman with red hair smiling at the camera in front of some bushes.
Alison Braid-Fernandez is a writer, editor and teacher living in Summerland, B.C. (Leoni Blue Photography)

Alison Braid-Fernandez has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Point of Origin. 

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 You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1.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 Alison Braid-Fernandez 

Alison Braid-Fernandez is a writer, editor and teacher. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Malahat Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and West Branch. Her poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and featured on The Slowdown Show. She is currently at work on a novel. 

Entry in five-ish words

"Wildfire season. Language, place, body."

The short story's source of inspiration

"Every summer on the radio, I hear it's the hottest summer on record. I wrote this at a time when I was thinking about how we pass stories down, and about Dorothy Allison, who said, 'Place is emotion.'"

First lines

The fire starts in the early hours when the light is still blue on the hillside. I wake as flames tear through sage and rabbit brush. We've been here before. A quiet drawing over the land. Smoke like a veil. It's harder to hear your own footsteps.

My mother at the window says, Look at the wind. Circles under her eyes.

It might turn, I say. Wind on the lake is changeable, shifts in a matter of minutes, but today it's blowing straight towards us. A fresh breeze, whitecaps swelling and crashing. 

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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