#BOOKS: LAURA MACGREGOR WINS 2025 CBC NONFICTION PRIZE

CBC Books, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partners the Canada Council for the Arts and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, today announced Laura MacGregor of Waterloo, Ont. as the winner of the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize. MacGregor’s story, The Invisible Woman, was selected from more than 1,300 entries.

As the grand-prize winner, MacGregor will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and her story has been published on CBC Books. MacGregor will discuss her winning piece on Bookends with Mattea Roach. The interview will air at a later date on CBC Radio and CBC Listen.

The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize jurors Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott, said this about MacGregor’s text:

“A moving, complex and lyrical exploration of what it means to mother a medically fragile child into adulthood: the exhaustion, anxiety, and grief of the everyday, and the barely contained rage at a system that fails to recognize the value of interdependency or disabled lives. What does it mean to witness the joy available to someone with complex needs, while shouldering the burden of being the one who cares for them? The Invisible Woman captures the heartbreak of service rooted in love when it is fractured during the COVID pandemic as a nurse wonders aloud whether ‘someone like him’ should be permitted access to a ventilator.”

Laura MacGregor said, “The Invisible Woman was my attempt to shift the light to illuminate both the child and the mother, to emphasize the labour and stories of mothers, and to assert that care cannot be a sum-zero game. That my story was heard and valued by brilliant Canadian memoirists, Zoe Whittall, Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott, is a gift.

“I am also someone who tends to say that I enjoy writing as a hobby. Winning the CBC Nonfiction Prize gives me the confidence to claim the title of writer, one who has a worthy story to tell. I am grateful to the CBC, the jury panel and the rich and diverse community of Canadian writers, who together, create spaces for writers to learn, grow and share their stories.”

The four runners-up for the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize, who will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, are: Rachel Foster of Vancouver for Summer Ash; Jennifer McGuire of Owen Sound, Ont. for The First Apartment; Lena Palacios of Montreal for Cancer Stage Exit 4: A Memoir and Crystal Semaganis of Bear Island, Ont. for In Case I Die.

The winner of the Prix du récit Radio-Canada 2025 was also announced: Marie Sirois for Gestation. More information is available at ICI.Radio-canada.ca/icionlit.

For more information on the CBC Literary Prizes, please visit CBCBooks.ca.