Alana Rigby has made the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Maryna.

The winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to 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 April 21 and the winner will be announced on April 28.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31.

Alana Rigby is a mixed-race writer and communications specialist living in Kitchener, Ont. She's been published in Freefall Magazine and Literary Taxidermy and was shortlisted for the Malahat Review Novella Prize and the Pulp Literature Raven Short Story Contest. Rigby has a BA and an MA from the University of Waterloo and is writing a collection of short stories about environmental collapse.

"Social anxiety meets family relationships."

"My grandmother died in a Mississauga, Ont., long-term care home during the pandemic. I had seen her just once over the last two years of her life. The daughter of two Ukrainian immigrants, my Nana was raised in Longlac, a tiny Ontario town three hours north of Thunder Bay. She was a teenager during the Great Depression and served in Yorkshire, England, as a radio operator for the Air Force in the Second World War.

"Like the titular character of my story, Nana was hard because life required it — and stayed hard even when life became softer. Her stubbornness left marks on the people she knew. The narrator's anxiety in Maryna is a reflection on both my own experience mourning my grandmother from an imposed distance, after a long separation, and on how any of us find the words to grieve what we've lost over these challenging years."

I'm late for the funeral. An awful start to an awful day.

I'm here sweating through my tights and blouse and wimping out like I always do. Shaking in front of the beatific angels that guard the doors to the Church of Agnes the Virgin Martyr. I can hear that they're already singing inside, and I know — I know — that these doors squeak like the Walmart shopping cart with the bad wheel that I always seemed to grab and the moment that I open the doors everyone will turn and look at me and think:

The winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story 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 2022 CBC Poetry Prize is currently open for submissions until May 31, 2022. The 2023 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2023.