Writers Rachel Foster, Laura MacGregor, Jennifer McGuire, Lena Palacios and Crystal Semaganis have made the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist.
Their nominated works are:
The winner will be announced on Sept. 25. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
The remaining four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.
All five finalists had their work published on CBC Books. You can read their stories by clicking on the links above.
The longlist was selected from more than 1,300 submissions. Submissions are processed by a two-tiered system: the initial submissions are screened by a reading committee chosen for each category from a group of qualified editors and writers across the country. Each entry is read by two readers.
The readers come up with a preliminary list of approximately 100 submissions that are then forwarded to a second reading committee. It is this committee who will decide upon the approximately 30 entries that comprise the long list that is forwarded to the jury.
This year’s finalists were selected by a jury composed of Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott. They will also select the winner.
Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant’s use of language, originality of subject and writing style. For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.
The shortlist for the French-language competition has also been revealed. To read more, go to the Prix de la création Radio-Canada.
Last year’s winner was writer Aldona Dziedziejko for her essay Ice Safety Chart: Fragments. You can read the entire 2024 shortlist here.
If you’re interested in other writing competitions, check out the CBC Literary Prizes. The 2026 CBC Short Story Prize is currently accepting submissions. The 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January and the 2026 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.
Get to know the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize English-language finalists below.
Born in York, England, Rachel Foster studied Photography at the University of Derby then immigrated to Vancouver, where she works as a wildlife technician supporting multiple conservation programs. Foster is currently finishing her degree in ecological restoration at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. She was the 2024 winner of FBCW’s creative nonfiction literary contest and is writing her first manuscript.
Why she wrote Summer Ash: “This piece is based on a summer contract I worked in 2021 in the Yukon looking for cavity nesters in burns. I was also undergoing a rare disease which ended up destroying all the hearing bones in my ear, leaving lingering side effects that still affect my daily life. With my work dependent on listening to and identifying birdsongs, this was an unsettling time for me. I wanted to draw parallels between an invasive, disconcerting disease and the experience of working in a habitat in northern Canada vulnerable to the disproportionate effects of climate change.
I wanted to draw parallels between an invasive, disconcerting disease and the experience of working in a habitat in northern Canada vulnerable to the disproportionate effects of climate change.– Rachel Foster
“People who feel compelled to share their thoughts, fears, and knowledge shaped by the land resonate with me. I’ve been moved by writing by authors such as Barry Lopez, Nan Shepherd, James Rebanks, Jennifer Grenz and Christiane Ritter. Folks who live and work in landscapes and share their insights from lived experiences and local histories so eloquently.
“Wildfires are emotional — many B.C.-based people have been or know someone who’s been personally affected by them. I wanted to share a memory that combines personal struggle with a working experience observing the nuances of ecosystem imbalance in a landscape burdened by fires of increasing intensity.”
Laura MacGregor is a writer, lapsed academic, and the mother of three sons, one of whom lived with profound disabilities and complex medical needs for two decades. To make sense of her life as an extreme caregiver, Laura completed a PhD in her fifties. After her son’s death in 2020, she enrolled in The Writer’s Studio (SFU), hoping that words might offer a path out of grief.
She is the author of several academic articles about mothering a disabled child and is a co-editor of Disrupting Stories and Images of Church to be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Why she wrote The Invisible Woman: “In 2024, four years after my middle son’s death, my husband and I celebrated our anniversary with a trip to Europe. While touring the Belvedere in Austria I discovered Exhausted Strength, a canvas by Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller. In the upper corner of the dark painting a small child slept peacefully, haloed by the light of a bedside lamp. It took several seconds before I followed the beam of light to the child’s mother, collapsed and barely visible on the wooden floor.
“As a mother who had cared for a profoundly disabled child for two decades, I knew what it was like to doze on the floor while my child slept, to be invisible in the face of my son’s extraordinary needs. I wanted to shift the light and illuminate the mother. I hoped that through my story I might draw attention to the labour and love of all caregivers who sacrifice to ensure a family member thrives.
As a mother who had cared for a profoundly disabled child for two decades, I knew what it was like to doze on the floor while my child slept, to be invisible in the face of my son’s extraordinary needs.– Laura MacGregor
“I parented a profoundly disabled and medically complex child for over two decades. My life with Matthew was both a gift and extraordinarily difficult. While I loved my son and was committed to his flourishing, his round-the-clock care was overwhelming, exhausting and isolating. Rather than being supported, I often felt abandoned, invisible and judged by the institutions and professionals that were meant to help.
“I wrote The Invisible Woman to illuminate the unsustainable responsibilities many mothers shoulder to ensure their child flourishes.”
Jennifer McGuire is a travel writer, essayist and author of the memoir Nest: Letting Go from Italy, France, and Ireland. Her personal essays have been published across North America in publications like the Toronto Star, Zoomer, the Globe and Mail, Good Housekeeping and Oprah magazine.
McGuire taught memoir-writing classes at Carleton University and at her home just outside of Owen Sound, where she wrote a syndicated column about her life as a single mom of four sons for more than ten years.
Why she wrote The First Apartment: “I had not thought about this time of my life for many years, and then I saw two pivotal movies in 2024 that brought it all back. Anora and The Last Showgirl. I became consumed with thoughts of the women I knew when I was working at the local strip club. I couldn’t stop thinking about the horribly lost woman who lived in my apartment building and the lost girl I was myself.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the horribly lost woman who lived in my apartment building and the lost girl I was myself.– Jennifer McGuire
“I wrote this for my son, whose arrival changed everything about my life from that point forward. He was my best chance.
“I’m a massive fan of the CBC Nonfiction Prize and admire the raw honesty that has always been the hallmark of the stories I’ve read there. I wanted to feel like a part of that community, at least a little. And so I write.”
Lena Palacios is a queer, disabled, fat/phat, mixed-race Chicana with Tepehuán and settler ancestry surviving and thriving in Tiohtià:ke. They play with their cats/muses when not writing on the run. An emerging writer, she has been published in carte blanche, The Fiddlehead, and the anthology i’ll get right on it: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Upcoming, Fernwood).
She won the 2024 Quebec Writers’ Federation’s carte blanche prize and was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest and The Malahat Review’s 2025 Open Season Awards (Poetry).
Why she wrote Cancer Stage Exit 4: A Memoir: “I am a recent cancer survivor who refuses much of the celebratory, ‘pink ribbon’ discourse of survivorship. Those who ‘don’t make it’ are often viewed as not being ‘tough enough’ in the ‘battle’ against cancer or exhibiting some kind of moral failing. In addition, the cancer-industrial complex and the financial toxicity of cancer ‘care’ are rarely put on trial. Also, death and dying become so over-medicalized that we lose sight of their inevitability and even desirability when suffering.
“In this memoir as a prose poem, which also includes playful acrostics and a sonnet, I refuse this discourse by reimagining myself as dying while taking doses of teonanácatl (psilocybin), which the Mexican and Indigenous people throughout Mexico (including my Tepehuán Elders) used in religious and healing ceremonies. Banned and erased in the historical record by Spanish missionaries, psilocybin is now all the rage with ‘spiritual’ tourism, EuroWestern psychiatry, and palliative care. While flying aboard teonanácatl, I pen an anti-colonial and queer memoir of dying, creating a fragmentary inventory of my life-in-death and death-in-life that leaves behind an infinity of traces in its wake.
“I would love to extend my community beyond that of three cats/muses Sonny, Sher, and Kimchi — all of whom are ardent admirers—so I take advantage of any opportunity to reflect on my process and share my work with a more expansive, diverse and critical literary community like that represented by CBC Books.
I am enjoying every minute of becoming a writer, even the rejection side of it, which motivates me even more to experiment and play with my work.– Lena Palacios
“Two years ago, at 46, I began spilling copious amounts of ink — mixed-genre, poetry, memoir and prose — and have yet to catch my breath, even going out on a limb and performing spoken word, which I started doing earlier this year. I am enjoying every minute of becoming a writer, even the rejection side of it, which motivates me even more to experiment and play with my work, and seek out beautifully skilled mentors who will tell it like it is, unlike my furball fanbase.”
Crystal Semaganis lives on a reserve in Northern Ontario and is an activist. Growing up in Saskatchewan as a child of the Sixties Scoop, reclaiming her stolen Nehiyaw (Plains Cree) life has been her focus for over four decades. Overcoming colonial violence is the goal, and she uses the creative arts to educate and inspire through poetry, short stories, a blog and other works. A mother of four and grandmother to two, her writing illuminates the reality of Indigenous life in Canada with clarity, truth and grace. Semaganis’ social media reaches over 175K Indigenous people daily.
Semaganis was previously longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2023 for kisâkihitin.
Why she wrote In Case I Die: “One morning, I woke up to an email from critic who targets me daily, full of vitriol and veiled aggression, and it occurred to me that I put myself at such great risk to be an activist who is also a woman and Indigenous. I considered my own safety, and I always do, and then I realized I do this every day and the weight of it came bearing down on me and you will feel the absolute weight of it in this story.
“Living as an Indigenous woman who has intimate knowledge of colonial harms, you get real familiar with injustice and all its forms. The worst thing about these injustices, is not being able to correct situations, even if you try. I’ve complained about harsh treatment in public places, discrimination, unfairness, injustice and often, those outcomes do not acknowledge harm to my people. My 34 years of sobriety, my accomplishments, none of it matters, sometimes.
I knew it was risky to share such intimate thoughts and feelings, but I wanted to be heard.– Crystal Semaganis
“The voices of my people are like mine, soft spoken yet fervent and clear — but are then silenced. The wheels of justice and fairness turn very slowly for my people. In coping with such atrocities, I struggle to make sense of things, knowing that even in the midst of all the injustice I have overcome, there will be more of it in the future, right up until the day I pass from this world.
“Being in the Sixties Scoop, I saw how things work for my adoptive family, and then I saw how those same systems fail my own people. Going to a bank, to a hospital, to a school, it is all different now and I must face challenges with matriarchal grace, knowing my children and grandchildren look to me to set the most powerful example I can. Thus, I carry myself with them in mind and heart, and I am a very spiritual person, I pray every day. This is essential in the work I do for my people.
“I knew it was risky to share such intimate thoughts and feelings, but I wanted to be heard. I wanted to be heard in a sea of teeth that destroys us, and sometimes a prayer spoken in paragraphs and shared with the world, could change things for the better. Maybe the softness of being, our being, could soften the hard colonial wheels that churn up my people, self included. Perhaps sharing this, could lighten the weight of it.”
