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Three Canadian Authors Shortlisted for the US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
Claudia Dey, Eleanor Catton and Janika Oza are finalists for the largest cash prize celebrating American and Canadian women writers / BY Susan Grimbly / April 9th, 2024
Three of five women vying for this year’s US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction are Canadian authors of bestselling books: New Zealand-based Eleanor Catton made the shortlist with Birnam Wood along with Toronto writers Claudia Dey for Daughter: A Novel and Janika Oza for A History of Burning. The shortlist also includes books from two American authors, Kim Coleman Foote for Coleman Hill and V. V. Ganeshananthan for Brotherless Night.
The shortlist for the largest cash prize celebrating women and non-binary authors from Canada and the U.S. was announced April 9, and the winner will be named on May 13 at a Toronto event hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, writer and Carol Shields Prize Foundation board director Natasha Trethewey.
The prize, co-founded in 2022 by Toronto author Susan Swan, HarperCollins Canada executive editor Janice Zawerbny and Don Oravec, the former executive director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, is named after the late American-Canadian author best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries. The four finalists will each receive US$12,500.
Catton’s eco-thriller Birnam Wood, a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is a nuanced psychological novel and a cultural satire of New Zealand’s contemporary contradictions that tackles climate change and environmental activism. She made history in 2013 when her bestselling debut, The Luminaries, won the £50,000 Booker Prize; at 28, she was the youngest winner, and her novel, at 832 pages, was the longest ever given the prestigious literary award.
In Daughter: A Novel, Claudia Dey writes about the fraught relationship between a playwright and her philandering novelist father in a literary stick of dynamite that exposes painful truths about art, family trauma and systemic inequities. Dey’s previous bestseller, 2018’s Heartbreaker, a CBC and Globe and Mail book of the year, is being adapted into a TV series.
In A History of Burning, Oza boldly navigates her remarkable, symphonic debut through a century of displacement experienced by four generations of an extended Indo-Ugandan family. The layered tale of loss, rage and transcendence won the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a finalist for the 2023 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.