Eleni Polychronakos has made the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Herringbone.

The shortlist will be announced on April 15. The winner will be announced on April 22.

Eleni Polychronakos is a writer and PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal. Her fiction appears in the Bath Short Story Award Anthology 2019, the Puritan, the New Quarterly and Joyland. Eleni's journalism has been published in TheTyee.ca, Rabble, Kyoto Journal and others. From 2011 to 2015, she belonged to the feminist collective that edits Room magazine. She is a graduate of the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University.

Rural Greece. 1965. Girlhood. Discovery.

"I'm working on an oral history project that involves interviewing women who grew up in authoritarian Greece. My mother was my first 'subject.' Her stories, which I've heard since childhood, are riveting and cannot be contained within academic discourse. The events and characters in this story are fictional, but I hope I've captured a sense of time and place."

Carnations. They filled our village that Sunday. All the children arrived at the square with bouquets, and my father wore a red one in the lapel of his brown suit. We gathered by the willow and squinted down the unpaved road that led to the public highway. There'd been snow, and the dirt had turned to mud. Litsa and her little brother pushed their way to the front of the crowd. Their feet were wrapped in rags and burlap. A man shoved them. They were so tiny that he only needed the length of one arm, pressed like a bar across their chests. "Get out of here! You'll embarrass us, you dirty little tramps!"

The winner of the 2020 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.