Maria Lioutaia has made the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Black Sea.

The winner of the 2021 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 22 and the winner will be announced on April 29.

Maria Lioutaia was born in Moscow, and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, Tin House, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and Conjunctions. She holds an MFA in fiction from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. This is her fourth time on the CBC Short Story Prize longlist. She is currently at work on a novel.

"A strained marriage at sea."

"Memories of a vacation to the Black Sea when I was a child."

On the third day of vacation, while Anna was taking a groggy nap in their rental room, her husband left. He returned an hour later, hauling over his shoulder a long floppy package in a green tarp. Anna's first thought — a dead body. Too small to be an adult. But, when her husband cut the twine and peeled the package open on the patio table, it was a huge fish, thin-snouted and pale. He'd bought it off the back of an illegal fishing boat down by the river mouth.

"Here's an interesting fact," he said, a cuteism they'd retained since their dating days. "The sturgeon is critically endangered. Probably because they're critically delicious."

Anna wanted to be grateful to her husband, but she resented him for making her feel guilty, here, too.

The winner of the 2021 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 the 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 2021 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31, 2021. The 2022 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2022.