Kate Brooks has made the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Ontario Peach.

The winner of the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. 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 April 12 and the winner will be announced on April 18.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31.

Kate Brooks is a prose writer and visual artist currently based out of Halifax. She has a BA in creative writing from Concordia University. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Malahat Review Open Season Fiction Award and the 2022 Metatron Prize for Emerging Writers. Her writing has also appeared in Whois journal and Metatron Press' MicroMeta series, among others. Her work explores themes of queerness, yearning, grief and home. She previously made the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Penny Loafer.

"Peaches, ravens, fly traps, summer."

"I hoped to capture that feeling of late summer and early autumn when everything is sweet just in the moment before it turns. The feeling of the first cool evening in August, the first red leaves, the night that creeps earlier and earlier. It's a meditation on loss, on what loss looks like in the moments before it happens. The state of waiting for it. It's about those weeks at the end of July and beginning of August when Ontario Peaches are perfectly ripe."

It's early morning when Sylvia says she won't share her strawberry with me because it's not sweet enough. She speaks under her breath about the fruit flies in the kitchen, which have been tormenting her all summer, and makes traps for them with vinegar and plastic wrap. They sit next to the ones she made with apple cider yesterday. I watch as the young raven collects the peanuts she put out for him on the back porch.

The winner of the 2023 CBC Short Story 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 Artscape Gibraltar Point. 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 Poetry Prize is currently open until May 31, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. ET. The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2024.