Basma Kavanagh has made the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for "Bone Shadows".

Basma Kavanagh is a poet, visual artist and letterpress printer who lives and works in Nova Scotia, in Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. She produces artist's books under the imprint Rabbit Square Books. She has published​ two collections of poetry, Distillō and Niche, which won the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Her poem "Coda", about a world after humans, was a finalist for the 2014 CBC Poetry Prize.

Time, minerals, memory, decay, connection.

"Contemplating grief a decade after my father's death."

"In late winter, I contemplate a hole in the ground — it's long and deep, with steep, straight sides and an ornate box at the bottom. I visit it a couple of times a week; after work, before bed, or in the small hours of the morning, but only in my mind. It's been 10 years since the absurd relocation of my father's body from the house where I grew up — where he lived — to a machine-dug hole in the ground on a high, inland stretch of the town where he was born where his remains, well, remain."

The winner of the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, will have an opportunity to attend a 10-day writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their story published on CBC Books and in Air Canada enRoute magazine. Four finalists will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their story published on CBC Books.