'Down to the Roots' wins second prize!

I am delighted to announce that my short story 'Down to the Roots' was awarded second place in the Short Story category (English) of the CBC Literary Awards. The Awards are Canada's largest literary competition for unpublished work in French and English. There were over 6,000 entries this year, including 2,100 in the English Short Story category. There are full lists of the English and French winners posted on the CBC website.

Shelagh Rogers unveiled the results on Thursday morning and a cocktail reception was held in Toronto that evening, hosted by enRoute magazine, CBC, and the Canada Council. There were interviews and photos galore, and it was excellent to get a chance to meet with the other winners from all across Canada. It was a real mix of people, from published authors to newbies.

Here's the evidence up close.

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First prize in each category receives $6,000, second prize receives $4000, and all of the stories are podcasted by CBC and published in enRoute magazine.

The judges for the short story category were Austin Clarke, Camilla Gibb and Michael Helm, and the readers included writers like Annabel Lyon, Erika de Vasconcelos, and Elizabeth Kelly.

This is what they had to say about my story:

Jury’s comments:
“Down to the Roots is a three-pronged examination of the cultural and social alienation of a small Ukrainian family (mother, father, and daughter) who are faced with the need to change their Ukrainian background into the larger, invisible and gargantuan Canadian way of doing things. The author provides us with a realistic smear of immigrant life. The attempt of assimilation is wrecked, washed in tears and in humiliation - the loss of love, the daughter's and the wife's, whose attempt to embrace the Canadian way of doing things, ends, for the older immigrants to this country, in these tears of humiliation. ”

National Post coverage
Georgia Straight
CBC (video)