Kirsten Dunbar has made the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Ma.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Nonfiction 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 Sept. 22 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 29.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions until Oct. 31.

Kirsten Dunbar is an aspiring writer who lives in the southern interior of British Columbia. She works for the local municipal government, is an avid equestrian, passionate dog mom and a loving wife and stepmom. She is currently writing personal essays and incubating her first novel.

"An elegy for my mother."

"In 2019, my mother died from cancer. I came home to spend the last days of her life with her. It's taken nearly two and half years, but I'm starting to be able to hold the beauty and sadness of my mother's life and death more comfortably. I wanted to share our story to help myself, and hopefully others, process the heaviness of love and loss."

At first, you couldn't bring yourself to tell me so you took a picture of the oncologist's notes. He'd drawn a torso and lungs, indicated a tumour, then made a list of swollen nodes and sizes in centimetres. He tallied the symptoms, drew a horizontal line and underneath it wrote "Stage IV", circling it once for emphasis.

Lung cancer with a single metastasis to the occipital lobe. You attached the picture to an email, entered the subject line "please see attached" and signed:

Love you honey

-Mum

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