Gwen Lamont has made the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Survivor's Guilt. 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.

Due to various misadventures Gwen Lamont was not able to complete Grade 9, yet today she holds a BA in sociology, a BSW and an MSW with awards for scholarship. In 2019, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Non-fiction from the University of King's College. Gwen was shortlisted for the Geist Postcard Contest for What's in A Smile. Gwen's book, The View From Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, will be published by Ginger Press in spring 2024. Gwen lives on a vineyard between two ghost towns in rural Annan, Ont.

"Women Murdered Survivor Bears Witness."

"Survivor's Guilt was first inspired by one murdered woman's untold story and how the intersection of her murder and my life shook an ancient memory loose in me. For years I had kept the experience of my own close brush with murder buried beneath the protective gauze of forgetting. That day, in the dark hall where Debra died, the buried secret of the child bride I had once been began to creep out from the chasm between before and after, and the realization I had escaped Debra's fate began to penetrate my carefully constructed life. From that time forward whenever I heard of a woman who was murdered by her intimate partner I experienced the uncomfortable and complicated feelings of survivor's guilt: relief it had been them instead of me, guilt at my survival. To research and write about victims of femicide, to bring their stories to light, is my way to honour the fallen women, to correct the narratives told of murders justified, of women who 'deserved it.' Survivor's Guilt was also my way to write my younger self back home."

The first time he hit me it was a slap, a warning. Punishment for talking back, he said. Next time I misbehaved he pushed me from a moving car. You'd have thought after all those warnings I would have stayed quiet when he forced me to have sex, but I didn't. I screamed. He put his hand over my mouth. Said I'd been asking for it. But I showed him. I floated myself to the ceiling to wait it out — a skill I would come to rely on in the future. Ever after he called me a mealy-mouthed-malcontented-slut. I couldn't argue the point. It was a time when what he did to me wasn't considered rape, but what we had been told it was: a girl's inability to protect herself, always her fault, never his. Besides, as a 15-year-old girl, what did I know about anything?

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.