New Award Will Honor North American Women’s Fiction

The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which will be awarded for the first time in 2022, will only be open to Canadian and American women and non-binary individuals. The new award will include a cash prize of 150,000 Canadian dollars.

The new prize was established by Canadian novelist Susan Swan and Janice Zawerbny, editorial director of Thomas Allen Publishers. The prize is named for Carol Shields, a professor at the University of Manitoba who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1995 for The Stone Diaries (Penguin-Putnam, 1993). Professor Shields was a strong advocate for women writers. She died in 2003.

The annual prize is the first of its kind for women’s fiction in North America. To be eligible, the book must published in the U.S. or Canada. Authors must be citizens and current residents, of at least five years, of Canada or the United States. Books written in Spanish and French are eligible if they have been translated into English-language versions.

In addition to the cash prize, the winner will receive a residency at the Fogo Island writers’ retreat. The winner will also be able to choose an emerging woman or non-binary writer for a year-long mentorship. Finalists for the prize will receive writer-in-residence positions at Canadian or American universities.