Ahmad Saidullah has made the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for "Sol Niger (Black Sun)".

Ahmad Saidullah's Happiness and Other Disorders was shortlisted for the 2008 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and made the Crossword Vodafone Book Award longlist. The book was also published by Penguin India and University of Ottawa Press published a French edition in 2013/ The title story, "Happiness And Other Disorders", won second place in the 2005 CBC Short Story Prize. His writing has also been published in Academic Matters, Blackbird, enRoute, Excess: The Tehelka Book of Stories and Once Upon a Time in Bollywood.

Meditations on time, event, place

"City walks."

"Walking through the cemetery this weekend, a habit I have fallen into, I downloaded a photograph from a friend, a traveller from the land of the midnight sun.

"I can't say what brings me to this place. I set out on errands but end up here instead. Whether it's my unconscious — what Jung calls the Black Sun — that draws me or my legs do their own pathfinding, I don't know. My aim was to search for an elided history, for signs of children stolen by the state but people who travel alone, like I do or my friend, often commune with shadows."

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.