Kate Bird has made the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for The Memory Library .

The winner of the 2022 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. 15 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 22.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open for submissions until Oct. 31, 2022

Kate Bird's writing has been published in the Sun, the Phare and Tangled Locks Journal. Her work was shortlisted for the Malahat Review's 2021 Constance Rooke Nonfiction Prize and the Phare's 2022 WriteWords contest. A graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, Kate is the author of three books of photography, including the bestselling Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos from A Decade That Changed the City and was the researcher for several books, including Making Headlines: 100 Years of The Vancouver Sun, which on the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award for the 2013 BC Book Prizes. Originally from Montreal, Bird lives in Vancouver.

"What's remembered, lives."

"One of my retirement/pandemic projects was to organize a lifetime's collection of my own photographs, negatives and slides, as well as collections I inherited from my father and grandfather. The process of looking through thousands of pre-digital images from the 1890s to the 1990s unleashed an onslaught of memories. The Memory Library is an exploration of the many facets of memory using examples from literature, film and memory research, organized according to the Dewey Decimal System of subject classification."

I am a librarian, by profession and by nature. The archivist of family stories, the genealogist, the custodian of hand-written letters and official documents, of photographs and Kodachrome slides and negatives and 8mm films and videos. A lifetime of recorded family history, preserved in photo albums, organized in the drawers of a filing cabinet, stored on external hard drives. And then there's the Memory Library, where remembrances are archived in the internal hard drive of my brain, ready, waiting, to be retrieved.

The winner of the 2022 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 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 2023 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open for submissions until Oct. 31, 2022. The 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2023 and the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2023.