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My Father's Four Funerals by Lizz Bryce

CBC Books | Posted: September 12, 2024 1:59 PM | Last Updated: September 17

The Toronto writer is on the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist

Image | Lizz Bryce

Caption: Lizz Bryce is a writer from the Yukon now living in Toronto. (Ryan Day)

Lizz Bryce has made the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for My Father's Four Funerals.
The winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts(external link), a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity(external link) and have their work published on CBC Books(external link). The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts(external link) and have their work published on CBC Books(external link).
The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 19 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 26.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes(external link), the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions until Nov. 1. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January and the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.

About Lizz Bryce

Lizz Bryce grew up in the Yukon but has called Toronto home for twenty years. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Geez Magazine and a number of online publications. She regularly explores themes around death, identity and relationships. She shares a house with her husband, who is often roped into reading the first (and second and third) drafts of her work, her eight-year-old daughter, who thinks more pieces should be written about her, and her aunt.
LISTEN | Lizz Bryce on making the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist:

Media Audio | Yukon Morning : We talk to a former Yukoner who has been longlisted for this year's CBC nonfiction prize

Caption: Lizz Bryce is a Toronto author who grew up in Whitehorse. She's been longlisted for CBC's 2024 nonfiction prize. The shortlist will be announced this Thursday. And the winner will be announced next week on September 26th.

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Entry in five-ish words

"Goodbye. Almost. Not yet. Ok, now."

The story's source of inspiration

"I wrote an early version of this piece in a memoir class in the week the assignment was to 'write something light,' so naturally I wrote about funerals. Before that I had been writing a series of really heavy stories about my childhood, my relationship with my father, and the time I spent with him leading up to his death, so I wasn't in the frame of mind to switch topics but there was a lot of absurdity to work with."

First lines

My father died early in the morning on New Year's Day, holding on just long enough to ensure we'd have to file another tax return.
It had been a full year since his initial cancer diagnosis, ten cross-country flights between Toronto and Whitehorse to care for him, and at least 978,000 messages in the group chat with my brother and sister where we plotted how to get our mule of a father to respond to his illness in a way that made sense to us.

Image | CBC Nonfiction Prize

Caption: The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist will be announced on Sept. 19 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 26. (Ben Shannon/CBC)

Check out the rest of the longlist

The longlist was selected from more than 1,400 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 composed of Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe.
The complete longlist is:

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