03-04-2025
Love is the Enemy by Vincent Anioke
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Vincent Anioke has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Love is the Enemy.
The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and their work will be published on CBC Books. The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The shortlist will be announced on April 10, and the winner will be announced on April 17.
If you're interested in other CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1.
The 2026 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.
About Vincent Anioke
Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian Canadian writer and software engineer. His short stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, The Masters Review and Passages North. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Perfect Little Angels, his debut short story collection, was released in 2024 and shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. CBC Books named Anioke as one of the 2024 writers to watch. He is currently working on a novel.
Anioke is no stranger to CBC Literary Prize success. His story Leave A Funny Message At The Beep was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize and his story Utopia was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize twice, in 2021 and 2023.
"The antagonistic shadow of love."
The story's source of inspiration
"I was reflecting on the dual nature of love after an intense personal experience — how love can exert a pressure that runs counter to our beloved's soul, or body, or agency, or desires, arguably for better or worse. I saw the tendrils of that duality tangled up in all kinds of love that define our lives: parental, patriotic, romantic, religious — and became interested in a tightly woven story that explored and hyper-focused on these threads."
First lines
"All the love under this roof," Mama used to say. Funny. Between my parents and my five siblings and me, there was never any silence, a plate was always breaking, and I, the oldest, was always paying the price — a belt on the back, a bout of yelling that provoked warm, pink eyes. Of course, by similar effect, there were some prices we couldn't afford to pay. Nights out at nice restaurants were rare and constrained to one entree per head, Fanta bottle requests denied for glasses of tap water. We could never fly anywhere. I grew weary of the Lokoja highway on those endless summer road trips.
Check out the rest of the longlist
The longlist was selected from more than 2,300 entries. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list.
The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie.
The complete list is:
