Nigerian-Canadian writer Vincent Anioke has been named one of five finalists for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize for his short story ‘Love is the Enemy’ standing out as the only African writer on this year’s shortlist.
Drawn from over 2,300 submissions received from across Canada. Joining Anioke are Trent Lewin for ‘Ghostworlds’, Dorian McNamara for ‘You (Streetcar at Night’), Emi Sasagawa for ‘Lessons from a Peach’, and Zeina Sleiman for ‘My Father’s Soil’.
Explaining why he wrote ‘Love is the Enemy’, Anioke says:
“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. I was especially proud of this story, how it feels deeply Nigerian with its focus on roots and culture and tradition, deeply Canadian with its focus on migration and assimilation and redefinition, and deeply universal with its themes on love, loss, and belonging.”
Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian-Canadian writer and software engineer whose fiction has appeared in publications such as SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Passages North.
He is the winner of the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and has been recognized as a finalist for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2024, he released his debut short story collection Perfect Little Angels, which was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. That same year, CBC Books named him one of its writers to watch. Anioke has had multiple stories longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize, including ‘Utopia’ (2021, 2023) and ‘Leave A Funny Message At The Beep’ (2024).
The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will be announced on April 17. The top prize includes $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Each of the other finalists will receive $1,000.
All five shortlisted stories have been published on CBC Books and are available to read online now.
Congratulations Vincent Anioke!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
