UNews - Chido Muchemwa

Main jury identified for 2024 Bridge Prize national short story competition

trevor.kenney — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:21:49 +0000

The main jury for Canada’s largest literary prize for post-secondary students has been chosen — and it features influential literary voices from across the country.

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s biennial Bridge Prize short story competition, presented by the School of Liberal Education, is now entering its third competitive cycle. Following highly successful competitions in 2020 and 2022 that have established the Bridge Prize as a significant national literary event, the 2024 edition has attracted another esteemed group of jurors.

“It’s exciting to announce another stellar national jury who will adjudicate the 2024 installment of the Bridge Prize,” says Dr. Shelly Wismath, dean of the School of Liberal Education. “The main jury includes award-winning authors of international renown and new and emerging literary voices representing different literary genres and regions across Canada. This is truly a national literary endeavour, and we are grateful for the jurors’ commitment to supporting post-secondary students and the next generation of Canadian literary artists.”

The jury consists of Michelle Good (Saskatchewan), Nicholas Herring (Prince Edward Island), Sheena Kamal (Quebec), George Murray (Newfoundland & Labrador), Danny Ramadan (British Columbia) and Madeleine Thien (Quebec).

The Bridge Prize, initiated by ULethbridge alumnus Terry Whitehead (BA ’94), has elicited more than 500 short story entries over the first two competitions. The first prize winner earns $7,500, while three additional finalists garner $1,000 apiece, making it the largest cash prize for any student writing competition in Canada. Munro’s Books, based in Victoria, B.C., is the returning major sponsor, and hands out $200 gift cards to all four winners. The winner also has their short story edited by Shirarose Wilensky, an editor with the House of Anansi Press.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto graduate student Chido Muchemwa won the 2022 Bridge Prize and was recently awarded a scholarship from the prestigious Miles Morland Foundation in the United Kingdom. The grant supports first-time novelists as they embark on writing their first novel. In addition, Muchemwa is presently in discussions with a Canadian publisher to publish a collection of her short stories.

"Winning the Bridge Prize gave me the confidence to pursue opportunities that I had previously felt I wasn’t ready for yet. I am so grateful to the Bridge Prize for taking student writers seriously and I encourage anyone eligible to apply. It really could be you,” says Muchemwa.

Submissions for the 2024 competition open January 23, 2023, and will close January 22, 2024. For more information, visit The Bridge Prize web page.

Following are short biographies of the jurors for the 2024 competition.

Michelle Good

Michelle Good is a Cree writer and member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for 25 years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of British Columbia while managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes.

Nicholas Herring

Nicholas Herring is a carpenter and writer whose work has appeared in The Puritan and The Fiddlehead. He graduated from St. Jerome’s ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in Ontario with an Honours in English Literature and attended the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto where he completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. He received the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2022 for his debut novel, Some Hellish. Herring lives in Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island.

Sheena Kamal

Sheena Kamal is the author of four novels. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts (HBA) in Political Science from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Her debut novel, The Lost Ones (US)/Eyes Like Mine (UK), won the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, a Strand Magazine Critics Award and Macavity Award for Best First Novel. It has been sold in 15 countries and was a Globe and Mail Bestseller, a Time Magazine Recommended Read, an iBooks Best Book, a Bustle Best Book and a Powell's Pick. Her debut YA novel, Fight Like a Girl, was shortlisted for the White Pine Award. Kamal lives in Montreal.

George Murray

George Murray is the author of 10 books, including seven books of poetry, two best-selling books of aphorisms and a book for children — his latest being Problematica: New and Selected Poems, 1995 – 2020. His work has been widely anthologized and published in magazines, journals and newspapers all over Canada, as well as internationally, including: The Drunken Boat, Granta, Iowa Review, Jacket, London Magazine, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, New Welsh Review, The Puritan, Radical Society and The Walrus. Raised in rural Ontario, Murray currently lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Danny Ramadan

Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author and advocate for LGBTQ+ refugees. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, longlisted for Canada Reads and named a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. Danny’s children’s book, Salma the Syrian Chef, won the Nautilus Book Award, The Middle East Book Award and was named a Best Book by both Kirkus and School Library Journal. His latest novel, The Foghorn Echoes, was released in 2022. His upcoming memoir, Crooked Teeth, will be released by Penguin Random House in 2024. Danny has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. In 2020, he was a finalist for the inaugural Bridge Prize award for his short story On the Miraculous Return of Khalid from the Dead. Ramadan lives in Vancouver.

Madeleine Thien

Madeliene Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of four books of fiction, including Dogs at the Perimeter and Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which received the 2016 Giller Prize and The Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been shortlisted for The Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize, longlisted for a Carnegie Medal and translated into more than 25 languages. Madeleine’s essays and stories can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, Brick, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. She has taught literature and fiction in Canada, China, Germany, Nigeria, the United States, Zimbabwe, Singapore and Japan and currently teaches writing and literature at the City ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of New York.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto student captures ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest

trevor.kenney — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 22:11:28 +0000

Seeking to rediscover her voice, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto student Chido Muchemwa entered The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest on a whim and produced the grand prize-winning submission. Her story, If It Wasn’t for the Nights, was deemed the best of 187 entries from throughout the country and earned her the $7,500 first-place award, the largest cash prize for student writing in Canada.

Bridge Prize winner Chido Muchemwa

“When I submitted to the Bridge Prize, I never thought I would win. I did it impulsively because I felt I needed to do something to convince myself that I was indeed still a writer,” says Muchemwa, a Zimbabwean writer currently living in Canada and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the U of T. “My father died in 2020, and I felt like words abandoned me.”

Muchemwa was joined by three other finalists as award winners for the biennial event. The Bridge Prize was established in 2019 by the ULethbridge School of Liberal Education and Vancouver-based alumnus and donor Terry Whitehead (BA ’94). It is Canada’s only national short story competition open exclusively to post-secondary graduate and undergraduate students studying at Canadian universities and colleges.

Each of the other three finalists, Lily Scriven (York ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ), Eliza Ives (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of New Brunswick), Fernando Tarini (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary), earned $1,000 prizes, while each winning author also earned $200 gift cards from major sponsor Munro’s Books. Waubgeshig Rice, who is also a juror for the 2022 Giller Prize, served on the Bridge Prize jury and is enthused about the quality of writing from the post-secondary generation.

“Serving on the Bridge Prize jury has been a major career highlight,” says Rice. “The stories submitted provided me a thorough glimpse of the exceptional talent among emerging writers in Canada today. I was captivated by the craft and content in each of the submissions, and I look forward to reading more from these gifted authors in the future!”

Muchemwa’s work was praised by juror Lisa Moore.

“The language is transparent, unadorned, and concise — an elegant piece of writing. The story is jampacked with nuanced moments, calibrations of tension and a kind of uneasy epiphany — not sentimental but ephemeral and beautifully satisfying,” she says.

For Muchemwa, whose work has appeared in Lolwe, Augur, Catapult, Baltimore Review and Bacopa Literary Review, the act of putting her ideas into a story again was cathartic.

“If It Wasn’t for the Nights is the only new story that I have been able to write since 2020,” she says. “The Bridge Prize is a much-needed confidence boost, and a reminder that the process doesn’t have to be perfect to produce good, meaningful stories.”

Muchemwa has an MFA in Creative Writing from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Wyoming in 2014 and has been shortlisted twice for the Short Story Day Africa Prize and placed second in the Humber Literary Review’s 2020 Emerging Writers Fiction Contest and in the 2022 Prism International Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction.

Eliza Ives wrote Office Story, which was noted by juror Joan Thomas as being, “Sly and witty, it captures the soul-destroying daily realities of life in a contemporary bureaucracy. The dialogue is terrific. So expertly done — Office Story reads like a published work.”

Juror Sam Wiebe was impressed by Lily Scriven’s Women in the Morning Light.

“Thoughtful and elegantly written, clever but not flippant, with resonant themes of art, history, and female perspective,” says Wiebe. “An enviably smooth prose style.”

Fernando Tarini’s Durian Days was praised for its “Clever angle, refreshing take on grief and youth,” by juror Francesca Ekwuyasi.

About the Bridge Prize

• Established in 2019 and first awarded in 2020, a new competition will run every second year.

• Total prize money for the Bridge Prize is $10,500, with $7,500 to the winner and $1,000 each to three finalists.

• 187 stories from students attending 48 post-secondary institutions in nine provinces across Canada were entered for 2022.

• An initial group of 30 local jurors, comprised of campus and community-based ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and cultural leaders, read all 187 stories. Each story was read by a minimum of three jurors, after which the field was narrowed to the top 70. Every local juror then read each of the 70 stories before 10 were sent on to the main jury.

• The six-person main jury was comprised of authors, artists and educators Francesca Ekwuyasi, Lisa Moore, Waubgeshig Rice, Bill Richardson, Joan Thomas and Sam Wiebe.

• For more, visit the Bridge Prize web page.

UNews - Chido Muchemwa

Main jury identified for 2024 Bridge Prize national short story competition

Related Topics

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Toronto student captures ��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest

Related Content

UBC graduate student wins inaugural Bridge Prize national short story writing competition

Related Topics

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto student captures ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Bridge Prize short story contest