Toronto-based playwright and actor Daniel Karasik has won the Grand Prize in the CBC short story contest for his work, Mine.

Karasik, 25, was named the winner on Monday of the $6,000 first prize. His story will be published in Enroute magazine and he receives a two-week residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Mine is about an elderly man suffering from dementia, who starts to address his wife as though she's the woman with whom he had an affair many years earlier. Karasik explores themes of fidelity and devotion in the story.

Daniel Karasik won the CBC Short Story Prize for Mine. (Cylla von Tiedemann)

Canadian writers Peter Behrens, Alison Pick and Michael Winter sat on the jury that chose the winner.

"A man lies on his deathbed and begins to speak — not to his wife, who sits by his side, but to his memory of the woman with whom he had an affair. It is his wife's response, and her voice — calm, measured, reflective — that makes Mine the story it is," the jury said in its citation.

"Thickly imagined and expertly executed, this is the sort of writing that reminds us of the possibility of redemption and the very hard work of being human."

Karasik's play The Innocents is to open at the Tarragon Theatre in April, after performances off-Broadway and in Germany. Karasik is artistic director of independent theatre company Tango Co. and his In the Light won the prize for best new play at Summerworks in Toronto in 2007.

He is one of 11 poets featured in Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry. Cormorant Books also plans to publish his first poetry collection in 2013. He also recently completed his first novel. Raised in Thornhill, Ont., he has wanted to be a writer since he was eight years old.

"I tend to move between forms a lot. Playwriting has been my bedrock for a while; the theatre was where I got the most significant early encouragement as a writer," he said in an interview with CBC Books.

"But I’ve written fiction seriously (well, "seriously") for much longer than I’ve written drama. My computer hard drive is dotted with the scarred remains of lousy—though completed!—drafts of novels composed in my teenaged years."

Four runners-up, each of whom receive $1,000, were also named on Monday:

• Pamela Ferguson of Toronto, ON for Autumnal.
• Alix Hawley of Kelowna, B.C. for Tentcity.
• Brooks McMullin of Prince Albert, Sask., for Pax.
• Terence Young of Victoria, B.C. for Mantra.