Elena Vochin has made the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Freedom.

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.

Elena Vochin is a short story and poetry writer. Before immigrating to Canada, she wrote poetry under her maiden name, Elena Cochia, and had received the Mihai Eminescu Prize for Poetry in Romania. She is currently enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. She has been featured on Humans of the World (howblog.org) and is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Vochin is inspired by the years she's lived in a communist society and also by her experience as an immigrant in Canada. She lives in Woodbridge, Ont.

"struggle, metamorphosis, awakening, friendship, freedom"

"I often ask myself what the significance of freedom is. I have found that freedom has different meanings for different people. In my experience living as a young woman in a totalitarian communist regime, freedom can also be a state of mind. My inspiration came from the need we have as humans to be free. Free of judgment, free of oppression, free to think and evolve in our own particular way. It is something worth fighting for and worth writing for."

Irina and Mariela had been working all night at the manifestos, cutting letters from newspapers and sticking them with "Albatross" glue made by the People Co-operative of Timisoara. There were no albatrosses in Timisoara, as their habitat in the Pacific was 11,680 kilometres away. Irina knew that because she looked it up and gave the information to Mariela who burst into laughter and declared that in a socialist society, even albatrosses had to comply.

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.