The CBC Literary Prizes occupy a singular position in the Canadian literary landscape: a national, publicly funded competition that routes work from relative obscurity to a substantial readership via CBC Books. The Short Story Prize is not a niche award but a broad-based call, open to any Canadian citizen or permanent resident regardless of publication history. Its institutional partners—the Canada Council for the Arts and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity—signal that this is a prize with material consequences, not merely a line on a CV. The winner receives $6,000 from the Canada Council, publication on CBC Books, and a two-week residency in the Leighton Artist Studios at Banff Centre. Four finalists each receive $1,000 and publication. The residency is the distinguishing feature: it places the winning writer within a working community of artists across disciplines, a context that can reshape a manuscript or a practice. The fee is $25 CAD, taxes included, per entry—a modest but real barrier that nonetheless positions the prize as a serious submission rather than a lottery. The curatorial vision is national and plural: a team of readers from across Canada determines the longlist, and the prize has historically surfaced voices from regions and communities that commercial publishing can overlook. There is no stated thematic constraint. The competition rewards stories that are complete, controlled, and alive on the sentence level—work that can stand alongside the best short fiction being written in the country. The absence of a minimum word count is deliberate: flash and short-short forms are welcome, provided they are finished work.