Zeng Xiaowen has made the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Wildflower of the Labour Camp.

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.

Zeng Xiaowen has published 10 books of fiction and nonfiction in Chinese. She has won multiple literature awards, including the United Daily Literature Prize in 2004 and the Chinese Writers' Erdos Literature Award in 2011. The China Fiction Association ranked her short stories in the Top 10 twice. She translated the beloved Anne of Green Gables and co-wrote a 30-episode Chinese TV drama. An English translation of one of her pieces was longlisted for PRISM magazine's 2015 Creative Non-Fiction Contest. She's earned an MA and MS and worked as an IT executive in Toronto for more than a decade.

"The kindness that nourishes the resilience."

"A thought has been lingering in my mind for years that if everyone has a book inside them, my book would be about my childhood during the Culture Revolution both in English — my third language — and in Chinese, my native tongue. It feels as though I have written other books in Chinese only to prepare for the telling of this story. The focus of my imagined book has shifted from suffering and vulnerability to persistence and inspiration depending on where I was in life.

"I met various challenges in telling the full story, so I decided to take a baby step during the pandemic and start with a short piece. Living in the strange and dark world of the pandemic, I hoped to share the light of kindness. That was how Wildflower of the Labour Camp came to be."

I am a child of the Cultural Revolution.

My mother, the oldest daughter of a schoolteacher, grew up in a small city with a population of a half million in Northeastern China, facing Russia across rivers. In 1961, during the Great Chinese Famine, she had just turned 18 and worked as the cafeteria manager in a local high school when she met my father, a Chinese language teacher from the south. They fell in love and got married soon after. One year later she gave birth to my older brother, but suffered from a lack of experience, food and milk supply.

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.