Murray Reiss has made the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Next Door to Evil.

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.

Murray Reiss lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C. His poetry and prose have been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United States. His first book of poetry, The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild, won the 2014 Gerald Lampert award. His second collection, Cemetery Compost, was published in 2016. A chapbook, Distance from the Locus, was published in 2005. He has brought his work to life on the stage as well as the page as a climate action performance poet and founding member of the Only Planet Cabaret.

"Relocating the locus of evil in the Anthropocene."

"I was born and raised in Sarnia, Ont. It's the hub of Canada's 'Chemical Valley', terminus of cross-country pipelines, site of more than 60 oil refineries and petrochemical plants whose end products created an unprecedented prosperity that trickled all the way down to my father's dress store while playing havoc with the stable climate that has made human civilization possible. This raises certain questions of complicity.

"Next Door to Evil looks at these issues through the personal — my neighbours (stand-ins for the leaders of Exxon and BP and Shell, who responded to warnings of global warming with massive disinformation campaigns) ran those refineries and petrochemical plants — as well as the historical: the trials of German industrialists in the wake of World War II. It attempts to relocate the locus of evil in light of the Anthropocene, following in Hannah Arendt's footsteps, except where she made a wrong turn, heading off to Jerusalem, for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, instead of Sarnia."

The summer I turned 19 I tried to save the world from nuclear war. Had I known then what we all know now I would have stayed home, sat down at the top of Woodrowe Avenue and blocked my neighbours' morning commute to work. Grabbed their car keys and tossed them into Lake Huron. That might have helped stave off disaster while we still had time.

But it was 1964. Who knew?

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.