Meet the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize readers
CBC Books | Posted: October 10, 2024 2:21 PM | Last Updated: October 10
These writers will be determining the longlist for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize
The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is currently accepting submissions until Nov. 1, 2024.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books.
Every year, CBC Books enlists the help of established writers and editors from across Canada to read the thousands of entries submitted to our prizes.
Submissions are processed by a two-tiered system. Each text is read by two readers. Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style.
The first group of readers comes up with a preliminary list of approximately 100 texts that are then forwarded to a second reading committee. It is this committee who will decide upon the approximately 30 entries that will comprise the longlist that is then forwarded to the jury.
This year, the jury is composed of Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie. They will be selecting the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlisted selections chosen by the readers. For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.
Here are the 12 writers who will be reading the submissions to the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize.
Charlene Carr
Charlene Carr is a Toronto-raised writer and author based in Nova Scotia. She is the author of several independently published novels and a novella. Her first novel with a major publisher is Hold My Girl. She was named a writer to watch in 2023 by CBC Books.
Her most recent novel is We Rip the World Apart. It tells the layered story of Kareela, a 24-year-old, biracial woman, who finds out she's pregnant and is struggling to find herself; her mother, Evelyn, who fled to Canada from Jamaica in the 1980s; and her paternal grandmother, Violet, who moved into their house after Kareela's brother was killed by the police.
LISTEN | Charlene Carr disses We Rip the World Apart on The Next Chapter:
Benjamin Hertwig
Benjamin Hertwig is a writer, painter and ceramist who spent time as a soldier. His book Slow War was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. Based in Edmonton, he owns Paper Birch Books, a second hand bookstore, with his partner. Hertwig was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in both 2018 and 2016.
In Juiceboxers, Plinko is a 16-year-old undergoing basic training before finishing high school. When he moves in with an older soldier, he and the other roommates, people from all different backgrounds, build an unlikely friendship.
After 9/11, the military plans to go to war in Afghanistan so the young men are sent to the battlefields of Kandahar and are forever changed.
LISTEN | Benjamin Hertwig on running an independent bookstore:
David Huebert
David Huebert is a Halifax-based writer who has won the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. He is the author of short story collections Peninsula Sinking, which won a Dartmouth Book Award and was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and Chemical Valley, which won the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize.
Oil People weaves together two narratives and timelines to unravel family secrets and the toxic yet powerful nature of oil. The first narrative is the story of 13-year-old Jade Armbruster in 1987, who is living on the family's oil farm, a deteriorating property built by an ancestor, as her parents decide what to do about the land and their business.
The other story is that of Clyde Armbruster in 1862 who built the oil farm and the rivalry he fell into with his neighbours — the reverberations of which are still felt by Jade and her family.
LISTEN | David Huebert on Bookends with Mattea Roach:
Rebecca Morris
Rebecca (Atkinson) Morris is a Montreal-based writer whose short stories have won the Malahat Review Open Season Award and the Humber Literary Review Emerging Writers Fiction contest. She is an alumna of the Banff Centre, winner of a Canada Council grant and an active member of the Quebec Writers' Federation.
In Other Maps, Anna can't wait to leave her hometown after visiting for her dad's retirement party. When she runs into her ex-best friends, she's forced to confront her past and figure out if there was truth behind the rumours about the New Year's party back in high school — and only then, can she move forward into a better future.
Sadi Muktadir
Sadi Muktadir is a Toronto-based writer and editor at Joyland Magazine. He was a finalist for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence, a finalist for the Malahat Review's Open Season Awards, a third-place winner of the Humber Literary Review's Emerging Writer Story Contest and a winner of Toronto's What's Your Story competition. Muktadir was on CBC's writers to watch list in 2024.
His 2024 debut novel Land of No Regrets follows Nabil's fast friendship with three other misfits and the chaos that ensues when they start pulling pranks and rebelling against the difficult and often violent teachers.
LISTEN | Sadi Muktadir on The Next Chapter:
Fawn Parker
Fawn Parker is an author and current PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. Her novel What We Both Know was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. Her poetry collection Soft Inheritance won the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize.
In Hi, It's Me, Fawn returns to her mother's farmhouse after her death — one that is also inhabited by four other women with interesting and strange beliefs. As she lives in her mother's room and tries to figure out what to do with her possessions, she becomes obsessed with archiving her mother's writing and documents, teaching her more and more about the woman she thought she knew so well.
LISTEN | How Fawn Parker writes about grief:
Amanda Peters
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry living in Annapolis Valley, N.S. Her debut novel The Berry Pickers won the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of CBC Books' best fiction books of the year. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers' Trust Rising Stars program. In 2024, CBC Books named Peters a writer to watch.
Her forthcoming short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, draws from her own background to examine legacies of trauma and resilience.
LISTEN | Amanda Peters on her short story collection Waiting for the Long Night Moon:
Nicholas Pullen
Nicholas Pullen is a writer based in the Yukon. His short stories have appeared in publications including the Toronto Star, Anti-Heroin Chic and the Copperfield Review Quarterly. The Black Hunger is his first novel.
The Black Hunger is a horror novel that explores human impulses, desires and history. It follows John Sackville who is stuck in a London cell and knows he's about to die. Reeling from the death of his secret lover and desperate to tell their story before it's too late, John sets out to write his last testament.
Journeying from mystic ruins in Scotland to the soaring mountains of Mongolia and Tibet, John reveals his own story, and the ancient horrors that haunt it.
LISTEN | Nick Pullen discusses The Black Hunger on CBC's Airplay:
Deepa Rajagopalan
Deepa Rajagopalan is an author based in Ontario. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room and Arc.
She was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. CBC Books named Rajagopalan a writer to watch in 2024.
The collection of stories in her debut story collection Peacocks of Instagram paint a tapestry of the Indian diaspora. Tales of revenge, love, desire and family explore the intense ramifications of privilege, or lack thereof.
Peacocks of Instagram is on the 2024 Giller Prize shortlist.
LISTEN | Deepa Rajagopalan discusses her debut collection Peacocks of Instagram:
Brandon Reid
Brandon Reid is a writer whose work has been published in the Barely South Review, the Richmond Review and The Province. He is a member of Heiltsuk First Nation, with a mix of Indigenous and English ancestry. He lives in Richmond, B.C.
Beautiful Beautiful is his first book and is also a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. CBC Books named Reid a writer to watch in 2024.
Beautiful Beautiful is a debut coming-of-age novel that explores the beauty of rural and urban landscapes, his relationship with masculinity and the task of reconciling an Indigenous and Western way of life.
LISTEN | Brandon Reid on his book Beautiful Beautiful:
Rajinderpal S. Pal
Rajinderpal S. Pal is a writer and stage performer based in Toronto. He has written the poetry collections pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and pulse.
At his nephew's wedding, Devinder Gill will be in the same room as his wife and the mother of his two kids, Kuldip, and his first love Emily who he's been secretly having an affair with.
However Far Away is set in Vancouver and details what happens when a secret threatens to unravel and how the three main characters found themselves in this situation.
LISTEN | Rajinderpal S. Pal discusses his novel However Far Away on The Next Chapter:
Anuja Varghese
Anuja Varghese is a Hamilton, Ont.-based writer and editor. Her stories have been recognized in the Prism International Short Fiction Contest and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Chrysalis is her first book.
In 2024, Varghese pledged $25,000 to the Dayne Oglivie Prize.
Chrysalis is a short story collection that centres South Asian women, showing how they reclaim their power in a world that constantly undermines them. Exploring sexuality, family and cultural norms, this collection deals with desire and transformation.
LISTEN | Anuja Varghese discusses Chrysalis on The Next Chapter: