Five Canadian authors are shortlisted for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

The $10,000 award is given out annually to the year's best first collection of short fiction. Two additional prizes of $1,000 are also awarded.

Administered by The Writers' Union of Canada, the award is funded by John Gleed in memory of his wife, writer Danuta Gleed. Her short fiction won numerous awards before she died in 1996 and her short fiction book, One of the Chosen, was published posthumously.

The shortlist was determined from 28 collections published in 2023.

The nominees are:

Lisa Alward's short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 2017, Best Canadian Stories 2017 and Best Canadian Stories 2016. She is the winner of the New Quarterly's 2016 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award as well as the 2015 Fiddlehead Short Fiction Prize. She lives in Fredericton. She was on the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Orlando 1974, which is included in Cocktail.

Paola Ferrante is a poet and fiction writer from Toronto. Her books include the poetry collection What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack and the poetry chapbook The Dark Unwind. She was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize and won Room's 2018 prize for fiction.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia is an Ottawa-based writer whose work has been published in Threepenny Review, Prism International and The Dark. She won the O. Henry Prize in 2014 for her short story A Golden Light.

Kathryn Mockler is the author of five books of poetry. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches screenwriting and fiction. Mockler was longlisted for the 2012 CBC Poetry Prize for a collection of poems titled Ice Fishing, Neighbours, Stones, Looking for Crayfish as well as in 2009 for Onion Man.

Idman Nur Omar is a Calgary-based writer who also teaches at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in the communication and liberal arts department.

This year's jury was authors Danila Botha, paulo da costa and Souvankham Thammavongsa.

The winners will be announced on Facebook Live on June 11 at 12 p.m. EDT.

Last year's winner was Kim Fu for Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century.

Other past winners include Zalika Reid-Benta, Carrianne Leung, David Bezmozgis, Ian Williams and Heather O'Neill.