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, have announced the finalists for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
The finalists are:
- On Not Knowing Cree by Ted Bishop (Edmonton)
- Ice Safety Chart: Fragments by Aldona Dziedziejko (Rocky Mountain House, Alta.)
- Not in Their Names by Alison Pick (Toronto)
- Is Life a Tossed Salad? by Evelyn N. Pollock (Coldwater, Ont.)
- Dad’s the Word by Emi Sasagawa (Vancouver)
The entries were selected from more than 1,400 submissions received from across Canada. The public can read the shortlisted texts on cbcbooks.ca. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Thursday, Sept. 26.
The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize jurors are Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe.
Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Good’s debut novel, Five Little Indians, won the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award and it also won Canada Reads 2022. Good’s latest book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada is a collection of personal essays that explore a wide range of issues affecting Indigenous people in Canada today. Truth Telling was shortlisted for the Writers Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Writing.
Dan Werb is a writer and social epidemiologist. He is the author of City of Omens, which was a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award. In 2022, Werb won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction for The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure. The Invisible Siege traces the history of the virus family and the scientists who went to war with it, as well as the lessons learned and lost during the SARS and MERS outbreaks.
Christina Sharpe is a Toronto-based writer, professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. Her previous book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Guardian and was a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her latest book Ordinary Notes won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Awards for Nonfiction.
The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be published on the CBC Books website. The four other finalists will each receive $1000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and will be published on CBC Books.
Visit cbcbooks.ca for the complete CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist or for more information on the CBC Literary Prizes.