Fil-Canadian writer wins prestigious 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize

Leyson’s winning entry, “Glossary for an Aswang,” was selected from over 2,000 entries. CONTRIBUTED

Filipino Canadian writer Louie Leyson won the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize for the piece “Glossary for an Aswang,” published on CBC Books.

Leyson’s winning entry was selected from over 2,000 entries. The British Columbia-based , will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and attend a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point.

Glossary for an Aswang was inspired by Leyson’s research on Filipino overseas workers. “Not enough people in Canada acknowledge the visible labour of Filipino migrant workers around them,” Leyson told CBC Books. It started life as an exercise in a writing workshop, run by Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt.

The piece’s fragmented structure is what appealed to the jury. “The stories within this story are painfully fragmented — much like, the writer laments, the histories, families and individual memories of the Filipino people, suppressed by colonization and dispersed across a globe dependent on Filipino domestic workers. Each fragment intimately situates the reader within the loneliness, isolation, injustice, violence and even death faced by those who leave their families in search of a better life. The writer demands that you look, and not look away.  Each word perfectly chosen and irresistibly placed, Glossary for an Aswang is the kind of story that you read and immediately say, ‘This is the one,'” the jury said in a statement.

The 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize jurors were Eternity Martis, David A. Robertson and Merilyn Simonds.

Leyson’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and National Magazine Awards. Other works have appeared in Catapult, The Malahat Review, Palette Poetry, The Rupture, Nat. Brut and Plenitude.

The CBC Literary Prizes have been recognizing Canadian writers since 1979.