Meet the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize readers

CBC

11-02-2025

Every year, CBC Books enlists the help of established writers and editors from across Canada to read the thousands of entries submitted to our prizes.
Our readers compile the longlist, which is given to the jury. The jury, comprised of Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott, will then select the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlisted selections. You can meet the readers for the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize below.
The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize is currently accepting submissions until March 1, 2025.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books.
Here are the writers who will be reading the submissions to the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
Sadiya Ansari
Sadiya Ansari is a Pakistani Canadian journalist whose work has been featured in the Guardian, VICE, Refinery29, Maclean's, The Walrus and the Globe and Mail. She co-founded the Canadian Journalists of Colour. She is currently based in London, U.K.
In this personal account, investigative journalist Sadiya Ansari looks for answers surrounding a family secret. In In Exile: Rupture, Reunion and my Grandmother's Secret Life, she strives to understand why her grandmother left her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to Punjab — and what she did for the 20 years after she eventually left him.
In Exile examines cultural expectations, child marriage and what it means to be a woman who doesn't follow what's set out for her.
Sean Carleton
Sean Carleton is a historian and associate professor in Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. His research looks at the history and political economy of schooling and settler colonialism in Canada. He also contributed to When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance with Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel which was on the longlist for Canada Reads 2025.
Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia is a book that looks at how the B.C. government created school systems — including Indian residential schools, Indian day schools and public schools for white students — to reinforce systemic racism, inequality and white supremacy. The book explores how better understanding this part of history, which ran from 1849 to 1930, can better inform attempts at reconciliation in education, policy and public awareness today.
Justin Giovannetti Lamothe
Justin Giovannetti Lamothe is a Montreal-based journalist who has covered major events such as the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion and the Fort McMurray wildfires. He was born in rural Quebec and has lived in Ontario, Alberta and B.C.
In Poutine: A Deep-Fried Road Trip of Discovery, journalist Justin Giovannetti Lamothe writes about the odd, winding origins of the closest thing Canada has to a national dish. Through his research, he learns more about Canadian history and draws closer to the Québécois heritage he used to drift away from.
Adrienne Gruber
Adrienne Gruber is a poet and essayist originally from Saskatoon. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Q & A, and five chapbooks. She placed third in Event's creative nonfiction contest in 2020 and was the runner up in SubTerrain's creative nonfiction contest in 2023.
Gruber was on the longlist for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize. She was also longlisted for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize and for the 2020 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
In Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood, Gruber explores the theme of motherhood through a collection of essays. It celebrates bodies, maternal bonds, beauty, but also the uglier side of parenthood, the chaos and even how close we are to death at any given moment.
Joseph Kakwinokanasum
Joseph Kakwinokanasum is a member of James Smith Cree Nation and a writer based in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. He was one of five writers named as a 2022 Writers' Trust of Canada Rising Star and was also published in the anthology Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing in early 2022. Kakwinokanasum's story Ray Says was a finalist for the 2020 CBC Nonfiction Prize. In 2023, he won the PMC Indigenous Literature Award in the young adult/adult category and in 2024, he was selected as the Indigenous Storyteller in Residence at Vancouver Public Library as well as the Writers' Trust fiction mentor.
My Indian Summer is a novel about reconciliation, survival and identity set during the summer of 1979. When his mother returns home only to collect the last two months' welfare cheques, Hunter Frank is left behind in Red Rock with his two siblings to fend for themselves. The siblings become involved in an adventure involving a trio of elders and a stash of cash hidden in 12-year-old Hunter's mattress.
The coming-of-age story is based loosely on Kakwinokanasum's childhood, exploring intergenerational trauma and the understanding that some villains are also victims. My Indian Summer is Kakwinokanasum's debut novel.
Perry King
Perry King is a Toronto journalist, communications officer and author. His writing focuses on themes of sports, community, culture and education. His work can be seen in Spacing Magazine, Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.
examines the ties between sports, community, environment and the transformative power of urban communities whose residents are physically active and socially connected.
Amy Lin
Amy Lin is a Calgary-based writer whose work has been published in Ploughshares. She has also received residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. Here After is her first book.
Here After tells the powerful love story between Lin and her husband Kurtis and how she copes with his sudden death. Lin shares how this loss upended her ideas of grief, strength and memory. Here After was shortlisted for the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction.
Lori McKay
Lori McKay is a journalist, editor and writer based in Dartmouth, N.S. She was a newspaper and magazine editor for over 20 years and Searching for Mayflowers: The True Story of Canada's First Quintuplets is her first book.
Searching For Mayflowers tells the story of McKay's mission to understand the real story surrounding Canada's first documented quintuplets. In 1880, Little Egypt, N.S., Maria Murray gave birth to five children. Unfortunately, all five died within days of being born but their existence made headlines locally and across the border causing the Murrays to bury the babies in a secret location. When McKay discovers that her great-great-grandmother delivered the babies, she embarks on a quest to find out what happened.
Jared Tailfeathers
Jared Tailfeathers is an Indigenous multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the art, history and future of the Blackfoot and other Treaty 7 Nations.
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The Art of Making: Rediscovering the Blackfoot Legacy follows Tailfeathers' land-based journey to explore and understand his cultural and historical identity as a Blackfoot man. It goes into detail about the evolution of the Blackfoot Confederacy and all that came after it.
Josie Teed
Josie Teed is a writer from Pelham, Ont. Her work has been published in Bad Nudes Magazine and Graphite Publications. Her memoir British Columbiana was a finalist for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction in 2024. She lives in Montreal.
In British Columbiana, Teed recounts when after graduation, she accepted a position at a remote heritage site in British Columbia showcasing the 19th-century gold rush. Living in a nearby village with a population of 250 and no cell reception, Teed questions her future and tries to find connection and purpose while living in a place frozen in time.