Rayya Liebich has made the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Right Hand Justified.

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.

Rayya Liebich is an award-winning Canadian writer of Lebanese and Polish descent. She graduated from McGill University with a BA in English literature and from the University of Victoria with a bachelor of education. Her work has appeared in literary journals internationally and her debut full-length poetry collection Min Hayati was released in 2021 by Inanna Publications. Passionate about writing as a tool for transformation and changing the discourse on grief, she is currently obsessed with nonlinear forms of creative nonfiction and completing a hybrid memoir on her experience of motherhood and mother-loss. She finds joy in teaching creative writing to youth and adults in Nelson, B.C.

"Language, lineage, loss and identity."

"Writing has always been my tool to process emotions and make sense of my world. I'm currently exploring both my new and my lost sense of identity and belonging following my mother's death. This essay allowed me to revisit how my multilingual household shaped my childhood and formed my sense of place in my family of origin. The creative process allowed me to grieve my loss and write myself home. Breaking the rules of craft to bend prose and poetry and switch between left and right lines gave me the freedom and courage to tell my story in an authentic way."

There are sleepy traces of the Lebanese nursery rhymes my grandfather stroked in my palms and idioms of expression like Yalla! and Mabrouk! that I forget are sourced in another language. I'm told I should no longer italicize words from another language in my essay. Doing so compounds the experience of "othering". In any case, the lexicon of my childhood home was built on borrowing from cultures and mixed with a multitude of my own combinations, grammatical exceptions and iterations.

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.