Doretta Lau has made the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for At Core We Think They Will Kill Us.

Doretta Lau is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?. She has written on arts and culture for Artforum International, South China Morning Post, the Wall Street Journal Asia, ArtReview, The Walrus and LEAP. She completed an MFA in writing at Columbia University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Day One, Event, Grain, Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Ricepaper, Room, sub-TERRAIN and Zen Monster. She is the co-founder of the humour and culture website The Unpublishables.

"Personal essay about poverty tourism."

"An heiress opened a hostel designed to look like cage homes — infamous Hong Kong bunk bed dwellings the size of a twin-sized bed — and I had mentioned my distaste at the concept on Facebook, which led to an argument with an acquaintance. It shocked me that anyone could be so cavalier about turning poverty into a novelty vacation experience.

"I wrote the essay because I needed to work through my thoughts about class, race, social media, how to suffer less and how to take positive action."

"Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn't begin the same way, each time it begins it's the same." – Claudia Rankine

When I was in the last year of high school, my family moved into a custom-built house with both a den and a living room on the first floor. Each room had radiant heating — I no longer had to sleep under five blankets because the heater was broken or sit on a freezing cold toilet seat again. I had early acceptance and a full scholarship to the university I'd gone to for free dental care as a child. We'd made it: in a single generation, my parents had propelled themselves from post-war poverty to suburban middle-class abundance, as evidenced by the three-pack of Pringles from Costco in the pantry, the giant box of Tide in the laundry room, the set of Great Books published by the Encyclopedia Britannica, the shiny black Kawai piano and the braces on my brother's teeth.

The winner of the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four 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 Sept. 18, 2019. The winner will be announced on Sept. 25, 2019.