Michelle Hébert has made the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for A Mother’s Guide to Urban Gardening.
The winner of the 2025 CBC Nonfiction 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 have their work 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 Sept.18 and the winner will be revealed on Sept. 25.
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.
About Michelle Hébert
Michelle Hébert has an MFA in creative nonfiction and degrees in journalism and social work. Her writing often focuses on mental health, social justice, and finding joy where it seems there’s none to be had. Her debut novel, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic was a Toronto Star Top 20 “Must Read” of summer 2024. Her memoir, A Good Girl’s Guide to Lying: Losing my Memory, Searching for Truth, & Living with Dissociative Amnesia will be published in Fall 2026. She lives in Halifax.
Entry in five-ish words
“Dying plants and hidden growth.”
The source of inspiration
“My writing space looks out on my little, often neglected garden. One day, as I sat at my computer worrying about a family member who was struggling, I watched my poor, stunted lilac tree bending in the wind. I reflected on the transplants, hurricanes, and poor gardening skills it had already survived. My family and I had experienced seasons of losses and hardship, too. I began thinking about hidden growth, resilience and the things we prune out of our lives.”
What the readers had to say
“Lovely and awful, a gentle reckoning with what we try to grow and what slips through our fingers. Leaves you wondering: What does it take to keep going when tending is not enough?”
First lines
I painted the bedroom in my new house purple, like the blossoms on the scraggly lilac tree I dug up and brought with us from the old place. The tree rarely had blossoms, but I always hoped. Every spring. My purple bedroom felt like sleeping inside hope.
Now there was a man standing in my pretty purple bedroom, his hand resting on the gun on his hip. I’d never been close to a gun before. I thought I could smell it — iron and fear, I imagined, but maybe it was just the August sun that made the room feel close and much too warm. I tasted bile. I had a fatalistic desire to touch the gun, like Sleeping Beauty reaching out for the spindle even though she sensed no good would come of it. Instead, I forced my eyes to the purple wall and thought of blossoms. The lilac tree. Hope.
Check out the rest of the longlist
The longlist was selected from more than 1,300 submissions. A team of 10 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 Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott.
The complete longlist is:
I married a spy. The secrecy broke my heart. by Diana Bayko (Calgary) The Sensibilities of Dogs by Antoinette Bekker (Medicine Hat, Alta.) The Space Between Views by Laurel Borisenko (Chemainus, B.C.) Day Shift, Night Shift by Jo-Anne Dusel (Moose Jaw, Sask.) The Pauper by Izzy Ferguson (Dundas, Ont.) Summer Ash by Rachel Foster (Vancouver) Reflections of a Teen Vessel by Cori Francis (Barnwell, Alta.) The Boy Who Loved Alice by Charles Hayter (Toronto) A Mother’s Guide to Urban Gardening by Michelle Hébert (Halifax) I Wash the Purple Water Bottle by Kelley La (Calgary) I got used to You by Yasmin Ladha (Muscat, Oman) Death on the Seventh by Jim Libiran (Scarborough, Ont.) Fishing with My Father: Reflections on Newfoundland’s Cod Culture by Boyd Lundrigan (Spaniard’s Bay, N.L.) Songs for Linda by Carrie Mac (Vancouver) The Invisible Woman by Laura MacGregor (Waterloo, Ont.) We are baptized for the dead in Taber before going to A&W for burgers and root beer by Cheryl Markosky (London, U.K.) Small Miracles by Anastasia McEwen (Fergus, Ont.) The First Apartment by Jennifer McGuire (Owen Sound, Ont.) The Home That Crossed Ocean by Raffi Minas (Calgary) Little America by Nancy Newman (Edmonton) The Townie Time Machine by Ian Orti (Berlin, Germany) Cancer Stage Exit 4: A Memoir by Lena Palacios (Montreal) The Art of Falling Overboard by Loghan Paylor (Chilliwack, B.C.) The Dances We Do With Our Children by Trenton Pomeroy (Rothesay, N.B.) 36 Views of Mount Royal by Lorne Roberts (Montreal) Out of Love by Barclay Rose (North Cowichan, B.C.) In Case I Die by Crystal Semaganis (Bear Island, Ont.) The Morel Moral: A Public Service Announcement by Shelley Wood (Kelowna, B.C.)