Jen Sookfong Lee to chair jury for $201K Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
CBC Books | Posted: January 30, 2024 5:21 PM | Last Updated: January 30
The North American prize is the largest prize celebrating women and non-binary authors
Jen Sookfong Lee will chair the five-person jury for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. The other jury members are Canadian writer Eden Robinson and American writers Laila Lalami, Claire Messud and Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
The Carol Shields Prize, now in its second year, awards $150,000 U.S. ($201,276 Cdn) to a single work of fiction by a woman or non-binary writer. Each of the four finalists receives $12,500 U.S. ($16,768 Cdn).
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is open to English-language books published in the U.S. or Canada, including translations from Spanish and French. Writers must be citizens or permanent residents of Canada or the U.S.
Lee is a Vancouver-born novelist, broadcast personality, a past CBC Short Story Prize juror, Canada Reads panellist and The Next Chapter columnist. Lee, along with poet Dina Del Bucchia, hosts the Can't Lit podcast, a monthly audio series about all things CanLit.
Her books include the memoir Superfan, the novel The Conjoined, the nonfiction book Gentleman of the Shade and the poetry collection The Shadow List.
Haisla/Heiltsuk writer Robinson has published novels, poems and short stories. Robinson's work, infused with dark humour, portrays the everyday lives of Indigenous people in coastal B.C.
Her Kitimat-set debut novel, Monkey Beach, was nominated for the 2000 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Son of a Trickster, a coming of age novel, was a finalist for that year's Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and won the B.C. Book Prize's Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Son of a Trickster was also a finalist for Canada Reads 2020, when it was defended by Kaniehtiio Horn. Her most recent book, Return of the Trickster, was published in 2021.
Lalami is a Los Angeles-based writer of five books, including The Moor's Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Other American, which won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.
Messud is an author and creative writing professor at Harvard University. Her books include novels, The Emperor's Children and The Burning Girl, and memoir Kant's Llittle Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write. In 2020, she became a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French ministry of culture.
Perkins-Valdez is the author of Wench, Balm and most recently Take My Hand, which won a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association and the Fiction Award from Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is an associate professor at American University in Washington.
The longlist will be revealed on March 8, the shortlist will be announced on April 9 and the winner will be revealed on May 13.
The Carol Shields Prize was founded by Susan Swan, Janice Zawerbny and Don Oravec.
Last year's winner was Fatimah Asghar for When We Were Sisters. Suzette Mayr was shortlisted for The Sleeping Car Porter which won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Planning for the prize began back in 2012 after Swan participated in a discussion of the status of women in writing on a panel that included Kate Mosse, who established the U.K. Women's Prize for Fiction and Australian writer Gail Jones. It was moderated by Shields's daughter Anne Giardini.
Looking at statistics generated by arts organizations like VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Canadian Women in Literary Arts (CWILA), Swan found that women writers were being reviewed in publications far less than their male counterparts.
The historical numbers for major literary awards are particularly dismal — only 15 women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1910 and about a third of the winners of Canada's oldest literary prize, the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, have been women.
Shields, the prize's namesake, was one of Canada's best-known writers.
Her books include the novels The Stone Diaries, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in 1992 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993, Larry's Party and Unless. She died in 2003.
Corrections:- An earlier version of this article did not name Don Oravec as the third founder of the prize. January 30, 2024 8:12 PM