The shortlist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction has been announced : NPR

The Carol Shields Prize is a newcomer to the world of literary awards. He is also one of the most generous. The winner will receive $150,000 and a residence at the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, Canada. Each of the four finalists will receive $12,500.

The winner of the 2024 Carol Shields Award, the second annual award, will be announced on May 13. Here is the shortlist:

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

In this eco-thriller, a guerrilla gardening collective named “Birnam Wood” (after Macbeth) meets an American billionaire. In his review of WHYY’s Fresh airwrites John Powers, “This New Zealand book is a witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.”

Girl by Claudia Dey

The protagonist Mona Dean is a playwright, actress and daughter of an insecure man, famous for a great novel. The Carol Shields Award Described Girl as “exposing painful truths about art, family, and systemic inequality” and “a study of intimate manipulations and the trope of the male genius.”

Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote

Foote’s first novel is partly based on his own family history. In the early 1900s, two black women left the Jim Crow South and headed to New Jersey. “Captivating, poetic and with a big heart”, writes Publishers Weekly, “it is a memorable work of grim determination and surprising optimism.”

A story of burning by Janika Oza

Oza’s historical fiction is inspired by President Idi Amin’s forced expulsion of more than 50,000 South Asians from Uganda in 1972. His debut novel follows four generations of the same family across continents and over almost a century. “An ambitious family drama deftly explores the bonds of kinship and the desire for peace and security,” writes Kirkus Reviews.

Night without brothers by VV Ganeshananthan

“What makes a person become a terrorist?” writes Emiko Tamagawa, lead producer of Here Now. “This book explores this question through the eyes of Sashi, a young Tamil woman who grew up in Sri Lanka on the brink of civil war. I was completely absorbed in this novel; Reading it, I discovered the history of the Tamil Tigers and the bloody conflict in Sri Lanka like never before.”

Celebrating women and non-binary writers

The winner of the second Carol Shields Prize will be announced on May 13 at a live event in Toronto hosted by Natasha Trethewey, poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and board director of the Carol Shields Prize Foundation.

Named for Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carol Shields, the award recognizes “creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States,” according to its website. Shields, which died in 2003 at the age of 68, was best known for The Stone Journals.

The first winner of the prize was Fatimah Asghar for her first novel When we were sisters.

This story was edited by Meghan Sullivan.