Meet the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize readers
These writers will be determining the longlist for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize
Every year, CBC Books enlists the help of established writers and editors from across Canada to read the thousands of entries submitted to our prizes.
Our readers compile the longlist, which is given to the jury. The jury, comprised of Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe, will then select the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlisted selections. You can meet the readers for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize below.
The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is currently accepting submissions until March 1, 2024.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at The Banff Centre and have their work published on CBC Books.
Here are the 12 writers who will be reading the submissions to the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
Max Arambulo
Max Arambulo has had a long career in books. He worked in publishing for many years until he left to become a psychotherapist with a specialty in spiritual care.
These days he combines his psychotherapy practice with his work as a bookseller and manager at independent bookstore Type Books in Toronto.
S. Bear Bergman
S. Bear Bergman is an author, educator and public speaker. He has documented his experience as a trans parent and writes the advice column "Asking Bear." He is also the founder and publisher of the book press Flamingo Rampant.
Special Topics in Being a Parent is the follow-up to Special Topics in Being Human. It is a queer guide to things the author has learned the hard way about parenting. The book offers parenting advice and wisdom, all filtered through a queer lens, to help readers navigate some of the complexities of raising children.
Esmeralda Cabral
Esmeralda Cabral is a creative nonfiction writer. She was born in the Azores, grew up in Alberta, and now lives in Vancouver.
In How to Clean a Fish, Cabral recounts an extended stay in Portugal, the country of her birth, with her family. Cabral, her Canadian-born husband, children and Portuguese water dog, Maggie, explore cobblestone alleys, try local cuisine and connect with the culture, seeking to make their own version of home.
Tara Sidhoo Fraser
Tara Sidhoo Fraser is a writer from Vancouver. Her work has been published in Autostraddle and Anathema magazine. Before publishing, she received a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the University of Victoria. Her memoir When My Ghost Sings is her first book.
In When My Ghost Sings: A Memoir of Stroke, Recovery, and Transformation, Fraser details how a stroke left her with amnesia and how, when her memories started coming back, she didn't always recognize the person who she used to be. She names that other version of her, Ghost, and in letting Ghost take up more space in her life, she eventually has to reclaim her sense of self.
Holly Hogan
Holly Hogan is an author and wildlife biologist who lives in St. John's. Her work has taken her from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and every latitude in between.
Message in a Bottle is a story about the central threat to marine life diversity: ocean plastic. In this book, biologist and writer Holly Hogan brings marine creatures to life as she recounts experiences on her 30 years of ocean travel. Message in a Bottle was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction.
Stephanie Kain
Stephanie Kain is a writer who splits her time between Ottawa and P.E.I. Her work has been shortlisted twice for the Lambda Literary Award and she teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa.
In the memoir Lifeline: An Elegy, Kain recounts her experience of taking care of a loved one who is diagnosed with suicidal depression. Through using a mix of literary genre forms such as personal essays, poetry and stream-of-consciousness, she recounts all that is a part of this complex relationship — the emotions of love and pain.
Alex Manley
Manley is a Montreal-based writer, editor and translator. Their work has been published by AskMen, Hazlitt, The Walrus, Vulture, Catapult, Electric Literature, Maisonneuve, This Magazine and the Literary Review of Canada. Their book The New Masculinity was a finalist for the 2023 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction from the Quebec Writers' Federation.
The New Masculinity: A Roadmap for a 21st-Century Definition of Manhood is a guide for escaping toxic masculinity and unlearning what it means to be a man. Manley reflects on the state of men's mental health and offers up ways to unlearn gender roles that put masculinity before one's humanity.
Monia Mazigh
Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. Her book Hope and Despair tells the story of her husband's deportation to Syria where he was tortured and held without charge for over a year. She is also the author of the novels Mirrors and Mirages and Hope Has Two Daughters. Mazigh is an adjunct and research professor at the Department of English and Literature at Carleton University. She writes in both French and English.
Gendered Islamophobia explores Mazigh's multiple identities as a hijab-wearing Muslim woman who has spent most of her life as an immigrant residing in Quebec. Mazigh reflects on Islamophobia as applied to women and the stereotypes that Muslim women face. Gendered Islamophobia was a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction.
Brandi Morin
Brandi Morin is a Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, covering Indigenous oppression in North America. In 2022, she won two National Native American Journalism awards for her work in Al Jazeera English. She has reported for CBC, the New York Times, Vice, National Geographic and more.
Our Voice of Fire recounts Morin's experience as a foster kid, runaway and survivor of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls crisis. Her memoir chronicles her journey to overcome adversity and is a pursuit for justice.
Matthew R. Morris
Matthew R. Morris is a writer, advocate and educator currently based in Toronto. As a public speaker, he has travelled across North America to educate on anti-racism in the education system. Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity and Belonging is his first book.
Morris was influenced by the prominent Black male figures he saw in sports, TV shows and music while growing up in Scarborough, Ont. Morris is the son of a white mother and immigrant Black father, and grew up striving for academic success whilst confronting Black stereotypes and exploring hip hop culture in the 1990s. In his collection of eight personal essays, Black Boys Like Me, he examines his own experiences with race and identity throughout childhood into his current work as an educator in Toronto.
Gonzalo Riedel
Gonzalo Riedel is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. Never Better: Two Kids, Their Dad, and His Wife's Ghost is his debut book.
The memoir Never Better chronicles Riedel's life from meeting the woman who would become his wife, to her getting sick and then as a widower with two young children. It tackles difficult subjects like how to keep his wife's memory alive for his two boys when their mother passed before their second son even turned one.
J. Jill Robinson
J. Jill Robinson writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. She spent decades in Calgary, Saskatoon and Banff before moving full time to Galiano Island, B.C. She won the Event magazine creative nonfiction contest twice and her work has also won two Western Magazine awards and two Saskatchewan Book awards. She was previously a reader for the 2016 CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize.
Robinson is the author of nonfiction books One Night At The Oceanview and That Story Is Your Mother's, and the short story collections Saltwater Trees, Lovely In Her Bones, Eggplant Wife and Residual Desire. She is also the author of the novel More In Anger.
