Jennifer Booth has made the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Kind Lady Lives Here.

The winner of the 2024 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 Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The four remaining 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 18 and the winner will be announced on April 25.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until June 1. The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.

Jennifer Booth is a writer and librarian living in Cambridge, Ont. She has an honours BA in English literature and a masters in library and information science. Her short stories have been featured in the Canadian Authors Association's Fifteen Stories High contest, as well as the Dorothy Shoemaker literary awards. She has written book and film reviews for several newspapers including the Waterloo Region Record. When writing, she likes to explore what life was like in simpler times. She has recently completed her first novel and is currently looking for a publisher.

"Signs of times gone by."

"My parents have often told me stories about what life was like for them growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, and I've always been interested in those time periods because they seem honest and true. My mom grew up in Hamilton on a train line, near which her and her friends would often play. At times they would see men tucked away in box cars. It started me thinking, 'What if there was a young person on one of those box cars who befriended these kids, someone who was maybe a bit older, and a bit more mature, who had led a different life than they had? What would the result be?' I'm also fascinated by the code by which the travelers would share information with each other, the signs that Joe scratches in the dirt to teach Milly about. This was a way that they could help each other out, in sharing information about where the kind people live, where the dogs are, where there's a place to sleep, even if they weren't literate, they could be a part of the system."

It's a hot day for September. We wait a bit for the heat to let up, then Joe and I take a walk to town. Joe's drawn to a side street called Amber Road. There's a house that he says is marked, so we take a chance and unhook the gate and walk up the flagstone path that had weeds poking through.

The longlist was selected from more than 1,900 submissions. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list.

The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is comprised of Suzette Mayr, Kevin Chong and Ashley Audrain.

The complete longlist is: