CBC BOOKS, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partners, the Canada Council for the Arts and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, today announced the winner of the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize.
Brenda Damen of Calgary, has won the grand prize for her story, Gibson. The story was selected from more than 2400 works received from across the country and is available to be read at CBCBooks.ca.
As the grand-prize winner, Damen will receive $6000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and her story will be published on CBCBooks.ca. She will also receive a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
The jury was composed of writers David Bezmozgis, Alix Hawley and Rawi Hage, who said:
“Gibson is a feat of fearless, poetic and even terrifying storytelling. The narrator, a young woman preyed upon cruelly and brutally by her father, nevertheless finds, through language and the sense data of the natural world, the strength and resilience to survive. The writing is elliptical, often aphoristic and replete with indelible images — from a young girl’s visceral experience of violence, to the skinning of a bear, to the storms and rockslides that thrill and shudder the world the narrator inhabits. This is writing of the first rank which demonstrates just how much a wise, sensitive and clear-eyed writer can do with the short story form.”
This entry is the first Damen has submitted to a literary competition. When asked why she decided to enter Gibson in the CBC Short Story Prize, she wrote, “I did not think I stood a chance of being longlisted, but entering was an act of bravery after keeping my book a secret all these years.” Damen has been working on a manuscript for 13 years, and many of the scenes in Gibson were taken from that longer work.
CBC Books also announced Julie Bouchard as the winner of the French grand prize for Fin juillet à Split Landing. More information is available at ICI.Radio-canada.ca/icionlit under the “Prix de la nouvelle” tab.
The four runners-up for the CBC Short Story Prize, each receiving $1000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, are: Lyle Burwell of Sudbury, Ontario, for Highballin’; Sarah Fulton of Oshawa, Ontario, for But Not to Call Me Back or Say Goodbye; Julia Jenkins of Nanaimo, B.C. for I Am Aani Littlecrab; and Julia Zarankin of Toronto, for Black-legged Kittiwake.
For more information on the CBC Literary Prizes, visit CBCBooks.ca.