Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott to judge 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize
Daphné Santos-Vieira | CBC Books | Posted: January 8, 2025 3:45 PM | Last Updated: January 8
The winner will receive $6,000, a writing residency and have their work published on CBC Books
Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott will judge the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
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.
Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their story published on CBC Books.
The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize is open for submissions until March 1, 2025 at 4:59 p.m. ET.
Zoe Whittall is an author, poet and screenwriter. Her past works include short story collection Wild Failure, the novels The Fake, The Best Kind of People and Bottle Rocket Hearts. She has also written poetry collections including The Emily Valentine Poems and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life.
She has received the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, a Lambda Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She currently lives in Ontario.
No Credit River is a memoir following Zoe Whittall through six years of her life which include the loss of a pregnancy, a global pandemic and abandoned love. Honest, emotional and painful, the memoir examines anxiety and creativity in the modern world.
LISTEN | Zoe Whittall in conversation with Mattea Roach on Bookends:
Danny Ramadan is a Vancouver-based Syrian-Canadian author and advocate for 2SLGBTQ+ refugees. He graduated with an MFA in creative writing from UBC and received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Adler University.
Ramadan's debut novel The Clothesline Swing was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2018 and his second novel The Foghorn Echoes won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.
Crooked Teeth is Ramadan's memoir that refutes the oversimplified refugee narrative and transports readers on an epic and often fraught journey from Damascus to Cairo, Beirut and Vancouver. Told with nuance and fearless intimacy about being a queer Syrian-Canadian, this memoir revisits parts of Ramadan's past he'd rather forget.
Crooked Teeth was a finalist in the nonfiction category of the 2024 Governor General's Literary Awards.
LISTEN | Danny Ramadan discusses the honest truths of being a queer Syrian refugee:
Helen Knott is a Dane Zaa, Cree, Métis and mixed settler-descent writer from Prophet River First Nations. She is a 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging author.
She is also the author of the memoir In My Own Moccasins, which won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Indigenous Peoples' Publishing and was longlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize.
Becoming a Matriarch is a memoir that delves into Helen Knott's experience after losing both her mother and grandmother in just over six months. It spans themes of mourning, sobriety through loss and generational dreaming and explores what it truly means to be a matriarch.
Becoming a Matriarch was a finalist in the nonfiction category of the 2024 Governor General's Literary Awards.
The jury will select the shortlist and winner. A panel of established writers and editors from across Canada review the submissions and will determine the longlist from all the submissions.
The longlist, shortlist and winner will be announced in fall 2025.
Last year's winner was Aldona Dziedziejko for her essay Ice Safety Chart: Fragments.
The CBC Literary Prizes have been recognizing Canadian writers since 1979. Past winners include David Bergen, Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields and Michael Winter.
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If you're looking to submit to the Prix du récit Radio-Canada, you can enter here. Les Prix de la création Radio-Canada also announced their jury today.
The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April and the CBC Short Story Prize will open in September.