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Mount Zoo by Paul Warren

CBC Books | Posted: April 3, 2025 1:30 PM | Last Updated: April 3

The Duncan, B.C., writer is on the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist

Image | Paul Warren

Caption: Paul Warren was born in Manchester, England, but now lives in Duncan, B.C. (Jan de Bree)

Paul Warren has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Mount Zoo.
The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story 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 their work will be 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 April 10 and the winner will be announced on April 17.
If you're interested in other CBC Literary Prizes(external link), the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1.
The 2026 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.

About Paul Warren

Paul Warren is a writer who lives in Duncan on Vancouver Island. He was born in Manchester, U.K., studied at the London School of Economics and at the Universities of Essex and Warwick, and taught at the Universities of Manchester and Strathclyde. Since coming to Canada he has lived and worked in southern Ontario and on Vancouver Island. He is currently focused on writing short stories; his story Ink is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review.

Entry in five-ish words

"A woman navigates contested space."

The short story's source of inspiration

"In early 2023, I visited the home and studio of an artist friend who lives on an isolated road between the foot of a mountain and the shore of a tidal estuary. My sense of this place, wedged between stillness and flux, was different from anything I'd experienced before, and I wanted to write about it.
"On subsequent visits I became more aware of the place's physical relation to current First Nations reserve land as well as to ancient Hul'q'umi'num territory. I knew that the story had to acknowledge this physical relation in some way and eventually — as I wrote and revised — it helped shape the narrative's central question."

First lines

She has lived in this cottage for a quarter of a century now, has owned it for more than a decade. Each morning she steps from its porch into a silence broken only by the crunch of gravel beneath her feet. When she reaches the end of the short path that leads past her studio to the narrow ribbon of road she turns left past her neighbours' properties — two tear downs and a still-new cuboid of cement and glass and steel and wood. As she passes the first tear down two huge dogs appear, padding noiselessly on the other side of the chain link fence, tracking her and her morsel of a Dachshund-Chihuahua mix.

Check out the rest of the longlist

The longlist was selected from more than 2,300 entries. 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 Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie.
The complete list is:

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