Mirabelle Chiderah Harris-Eze has made the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for dark.

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.

Mirabelle Chiderah Harris-Eze is a Canadian Nigerian American who loves writing about Chinooks, failure and Igbo masquerades. Her work has been longlisted for the international Commonwealth Short Story Prize twice. In 2021, her story dark won the Writers' Union of Canada's Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers. Mirabelle is currently working on her debut novel and believes the jubilant, harrowing, and vast histories of the African diaspora are worth writing about. An avid community volunteer, Mirabelle served as the 2022-2023 National President of the Black Law Students' Association of Canada. Her story Brake was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize.

"(In)Visible teen internalizes social hierarchies."

"A Nigerian Canadian leader in my community posted about an encounter she had in an African market in Calgary. She'd met a man buying bleaching soap for his six-year-old daughter on the advice of his wife. Apparently, this child was too dark. I was enraged — at this man and his wife — and when I am enraged, I write. I think about singular moments as microcosms. I consider what I know and what I don't know. I wrote "dark" to better understand the complex socio-cultural conditions that could compel a young girl to bleach her skin."

Your thighs are touching.

It's baseball, it's gym, and Mr. Anders is on the field, yelling about second base. You are both sitting on the wooden bench behind the backstop. Your thighs are touching through identical, nylon-blue gym shorts and, midway down, through skin.

"I'm so dark," Taku says.

You look up, look at him. "What?"

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.