Giller Prize winner Suzette Mayr shortlisted for $206K Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2023
Catherine Zhu | CBC Books | Posted: April 14, 2023 8:14 PM | Last Updated: April 14, 2023
The inaugural prize celebrates creativity and excellence in fiction
Suzette Mayr is the only Canadian writer, and one of five North American authors shortlisted for the inaugural $206K prize for women and non-binary writers.
A poet and novelist from Calgary, she is the author of the novels Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Monoceros, Moon Honey, The Widows and Venous Hum.
Mayr is shortlisted for her sixth novel, The Sleeping Car Porter. The novel won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The Sleeping Car Porter tells the story of Baxter, a Black man in 1929 who works as a sleeping-car porter on a train that travels across the country. He smiles and tries to be invisible to the passengers, but what he really wants is to save up and go to dentistry school. On one particular trip out west, the train is stalled and Baxter finds a postcard of two gay men. The postcard reawakens his memories and longings and puts his job in jeopardy.
The novel brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
"One of the things that I want people to take away from this book is to be nice to people in the service industry. It's important that Black people become part of the fabric of the history of this country. It gets a little tiring when the only time you talk about it is in February because it's Black History Month. It's every month. It's everywhere," Mayr said in an interview with CBC Books.
LISTEN | Suzette Mayr discusses The Sleeping Car Porter:
Mayr's historical fiction novel highlights and uncovers Black Canadian history. It acknowledges the importance of the sleeping car porters and the communities around them who are an important part of Canadian history.
"It's all the time, and it's not necessarily about Black pain or suffering or victimhood. The porters were important in helping to establish a Black middle class, one that had a ton of impact in all kinds of ways including labour rights.
"This particular group worked really hard to get ahead. I'm not necessarily related to one of these porters, as far as I know, but they've paved the way for me in all kinds of ways.
"Black history matters, every month of the year."
The other four titles shortlisted are American titles: Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades, When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar, What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri and Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin.
Andreades' novel Brown Girls is a collective portrait of childhood, adulthood, and beyond. It explores female friendship, and is a powerful depiction of women of color attempting to forge their place in the world today.
Asghar's novel When We Were Sisters is about the bonds and fractures of sisterhood. Naming the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, the story illustrates how those who've lost everything might still make homes in one another.
In nine stories that span the globe, Kolluri's novel What We Fed to the Manticore takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of animal narrators to understand the triumphs, heartbreaks, and complexities of the creatures that share our world.
Schaitkin's book Elsewhere has elements of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and the imaginative depth of Margaret Atwood. It conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.
This year's finalists were selected by a jury comprised of writers Katherena Vermette, Anita Rau Badami, Monique Truong, Crystal Wilkinson and Merilyn Simonds.
The inaugural winner will be announced on May 4 at an event in Nashville. They will receive $150,000 USD ($206, 432 Cdn) and a residency at Fogo Island Inn.
The four finalists will each receive $12,500 USD ($17,196 Cdn).
LISTEN | A conversation with Carol Shields:
Named after the late author Carol Shields, the award acknowledges, celebrates and promotes fiction by a wider, more diverse, and inclusive group of women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.
Shields is the author of over 20 books and won numerous prizes. Her novel The Stone Diaries won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the Pulitzer Prize.
Managed by the Carol Shields Prize Foundation, which encourages women to participate in literary arts, the prize addresses financial insecurity and gender inequality in the literary industry.