Isa S. You has made the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Motherland.

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.

Isa S. You is a writer and photographer based out of Vancouver. She is completing her BFA with a major in creative writing and a minor in Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies at the University of British Columbia. Her work explores themes of familial relationships, diasporic longing and how the past bleeds into our present.

"Returning to the mother land."

"Funnily enough, the first sentence came to me in a dream. This story was heavily inspired by my own lived experience, having moved around all my life as a second generation Chinese-Canadian woman. I have always been interested in stories about the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships: the endless misunderstandings, the struggle for power, and how we so often retrace the steps of our parents without knowing it. This is a narrative about a daughter's pilgrimage through China in the wake of her mother's passing."

I dream of China for weeks.

The Guìlín mountains of the classical ink paintings, like smokestacks as fog rolls through. The willow bends of the Sūzhōu streams alongside the white walls and black tiled roofs. The rush of the Yellow River, its currents racing toward the sea. But most of all, I dream of the Gobi Desert, the edge of which you are from.

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.