Byron Hamel has made the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Can't Fight the Ocean. The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 14 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 21.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions.

Byron Hamel won the Nicholl Fellowship for his mostly true screenplay Shade of the Grapefruit Tree, about his abusive childhood, but with robots. He was mentored by sci-fi icon Nicholas Meyer (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Star Trek II) and Newfoundland poet Al Pittman (West Moon). Born in Labrador to French-Inuit and Irish-American parents, Byron was displaced, and grew up impoverished in some of America's most violent slums, raised by a convicted child murderer. Returning to Canada with chronic PTSD, Byron found a home in sharing poetry, music and film. He adores unexpected love and being an awesome girl dad.

"Let go or die stubborn."

"The tough lessons my uncle gave me are central to everything I think of as good. I'm still struck by how gentle and humble a man of his strength can be. I look around at the world today and see all these men who think their anger and cruelty give them strength. Waving around guns and hypocritical ideals. Racism. Sexism. Fighting to be at the top of a pile of garbage, instead of working hard to build something great which incorporates the undeniably beautiful soul of society and the fabric of kindness. Stubbornly clinging to what's about to destroy them. I could have been that guy.

"Really, they're just scared. Because they're not strong. They're weak of mind, body, and soul. These guys need to learn what true strength is. It's about loving courageously, even when you don't get anything from it. It's about the admission of wrongness, and the risk of letting go. The surrender of that desire to control. The becoming one with the overwhelming power which flows all around you. The listening and learning. And finally, the will to be a better person. In my mind, these lost men need my Uncle Les. So, I wrote poetry about him, and then this short story, and a film treatment."

I was never a fisherman by trade, but I spent a season at it with my uncle Les on the coast of Labrador. We set, tended, harvested and cleaned gill nets. Our catch was mostly Atlantic salmon and Arctic char.

As a child, I didn't know my Euro-Inuit Canadian family. Even though I was born on a Canadian military airbase, I grew up in America. And I mean all over America. We moved constantly. Tenth grade was my tenth school. That's how often we picked up and left. Which means that's how often things got bad.

The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction 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 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2023 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2024 and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2024.