LONGLIST
LONGLIST
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction’s inaugural longlist includes 15 writers from across Canada and the U.S., one of whom will win the $150,000 USD grand prize, presented by BMO.
Longlist selections were chosen by a Jury of esteemed writers including Anita Rau Badami, Merilyn Simonds, Monique Truong, katherena vermette and Crystal Wilkinson.
The longlist was selected from more than 250 eligible entries of fiction books written by Canadian and U.S. women and non-binary writers, written and published in English in 2022. In addition to the grand prize, the winner will receive a residency at Fogo Island Inn, and each of the four finalists will receive $12,500 USD. The 5 shortlisted titles will be announced on April 6 and the winner on May 4.
Daphne Palasi Andreades
Brown Girls (Random House)
Fatimah Asghar
When We Were Sisters (One World)
Andrea Barrett
Natural History: Stories (Norton)
Lisa Hsiao Chen
Activities of Daily Living (Norton)
Francine Cunningham
God Isn't Here Today (Invisible Publishing)
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Woman of Light (One World)
Liana Finck
Let There Be Light (Random House)
Emma Hooper
We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky (Penguin Canada)
Gish Jen
Thank You, Mr. Nixon (Knopf)
Chelene Knight
Junie (Book*hug Press)
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House)
Tsering Yangzom Lama
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies
(McClelland & Stewart)
Suzette Mayr
The Sleeping Car Porter (Coach House Books)
Alexis Schaitkin
Elsewhere (Celadon Books)
Namwali Serpell
The Furrows: A Novel (Hogarth)
Meet the 2023 Nominees
Brown Girls (Random House) is a blazingly original debut novel told by a chorus of unforgettable voices.
“Brown Girls achieves immediate liftoff. . . . Along the way a lot of subjects are turned over for examination. Like a DJ, the author picks up the needle and puts it back down in unexpected places. . . . Fearless.” —The New York Times
Daphne Palasi Andreades is the author of the debut novel, Brown Girls. Brown Girls was chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a finalist for the New American Voices Award, and an Indie Next Pick by booksellers across the country.
Daphne is a graduate of The City University of New York—Baruch College and Columbia University’s MFA Fiction program, where she was awarded a Henfield Prize and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She is the recipient of an O.Henry Prize, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and other honors. Her fiction often explores diaspora, immigration, family, and hybrid identities. Her work also embraces formal innovation, experimentation, and draws from disciplines such as poetry, history, visual art, and more. She is at work on several projects, including her second novel, short stories, and other works. Born and raised in Queens, New York, she lives in New York City.
When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar (One World) traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another.
“Braids lyric and narrative vignettes into a tender, vivid, heart-aching story of three orphaned sisters and the world they create together, the great beauty and stunning pain of that belonging… captured . . . with a poet’s ear for language. The characters are so thoughtfully rendered, so three-dimensional in their . . . infinite complications.”—Electric Literature
Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. A poet, a fiction writer, and a filmmaker, Fatimah cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and authentic collaboration. Their first book of poems If They Come For Us explored themes of orphaning, family, Partition, borders, shifting identity, and violence. Along with Safia Elhillo, they co-edited Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology for Muslim people who are also women, trans, gender non-conforming, and/or queer. The anthology was built around the radical idea that there are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslim people in the world. They also wrote and co-created Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendship among women of color. Their debut lyrical novel, When We Were Sisters, explores sisterhood, orphaning, and alternate family building, and is forthcoming October 2022. While these projects approach storytelling through various mediums and tones, at the heart of all of them is Fatimah’s unique voice, insistence on creating alternate possibilities of identity, relationships and humanity then the ones that society would box us into, and a deep play and joy embedded in the craft.
In Natural History: Stories (Norton), Andrea Barrett completes the beautiful arc of intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers and innovators that she has been weaving through multiple books.
“Barrett depicts the natural world and the human heart with wonder, tenderness, and deep understanding. More superb work from an American master.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Andrea Barrett is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including the National Book Award–winning Ship Fever and Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the Story Prize and a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Having lived in Rochester, New York, and western Massachusetts, Barrett now resides in the Adirondacks.
Activities of Daily Living (Norton) explores the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.
“Chen writes with cool, elegant precision... [Activities of Daily Living is] an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life.” —The New York Times
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the Gotham Book Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was selected by The New Yorker and Vogue as a Best Book of 2022 and as a Top 10 Book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly. Her book of poems, Mouth (Kaya Press), received an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Fiction, Art Omi: Writers, and Vermont Studio Center. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City.
The stories in God Isn’t Here Today (Invisible Publishing) ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice.
“Cunningham’s characters find light in darkness, music in silence, and moments of transformation when they least expect it.”—The Quarantine Review
Francine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist and educator. God Isn’t Here Today is her debut collection of short fiction, and her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for the BC and Yukon Book Prize, the Indigenous Voices Awards, and the Vancouver Book Award. She is a winner of the Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories 2021, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Prose shortlist, and in Joyland Magazine, The Puritan and elsewhere. Francine is a graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of British Columbia, and currently resides in Alberta.
Woman of Light (One World) is an epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West.
“Fajardo-Anstine brings to life in sensory-rich details . . . a lush, immersive historical novel.”—Kirkus Reviews
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Woman of Light and the story collection Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of an American Book Award. She is the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the 2022 - 2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. She is from Denver, Colorado.
In Let There Be Light (Random House) Liana Finck turns her keen eye to none other than the Old Testament, reimagining the story of Genesis with God as a woman, Abraham as a resident of New York City, and Rebekah as a robot, among many other delightful twists.
“An irreverent yet profound retelling of the Book of Genesis . . . Throughout, God and readers are reminded that light can’t exist without darkness, or creation without destruction. Finck’s exploration offers much light in both senses: levity and illumination.” —Publishers Weekly
Liana Finck is the author of Passing for Human and Excuse Me and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. She has had artist residencies with MacDowell, Yaddo, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay.
We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky (Penguin Canada) is an epic, boundary-pushing tale of five young women rebelling against an era that relies on their submission.
“[T]he breezy summer read [you] need to escape to a different time and place. . . . Even with themes of death, suppression, separation and starvation, Hooper keeps a sense of lightness and humour. . . . [There is] fierce bravery presented in myriad forms, whether it is to run from a life you don’t want, fight back, find a home, or love.” —The Globe and Mail
Raised in Alberta, Emma Hooper is a musician and writer. As a musician she performs as solo artist Waitress for the Bees, a project which earned her a Finnish Cultural Knighthood. She has also performed with Peter Gabriel, The Heavy, her string quartet Red Carousel, and numerous others. Her debut novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James, was an international bestseller and was published in 24 countries. Our Homesick Songs, her second novel, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2018. She now lives in the soft green of England’s South-West, but comes home to Canada to cross-country ski as much as she can.
Thank You, Mr. Nixon (Knopf) takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China and its unexpected effects on the lives of ordinary people.
“Every story in this collection […] is outstanding. Thank You, Mr. Nixon is an exceptional collection, written with intelligence, wit and grace — it's one of the best books of Jen's remarkable career.”
—NPR
Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel and is widely taught.
Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.
Thank You, Mr. Nixon is her ninth book.
Junie (Book*hug Press) is a riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships and the dynamic vitality of Vancouver’s former Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood.
“Junie is an engaging historical novel about the resilience, discoveries, and courage of women.” —Foreword Reviews
Vancouver-born Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and The Walrus and her work has been widely anthologized. Her poem ‘Welwitschia’ won the 2020 Contemporary Verse 2‘s Editor’s Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM‘s 2021 Short Forms contest. Chelene is the founder of her own literary studio, Breathing Space Creative, through which she has launched The Forever Writers Club, whose members are writers focused on creative sustainability. Chelene works as a literary agent with the Transatlantic Agency. She lives in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.
What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House) 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.
“Exquisite. . . . exceptional. . . . This remarkable collection leaves an indelible mark.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred)
Set to take its rightful place among some of the best environmental fiction in recent memory. —Chicago Review of Books
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. Her work has been published in The Minnesota Review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, Five Dials, and the Adroit Journal.
A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and their cat.
We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies (McClelland & Stewart) is a compelling and profound debut novel about a Tibetan family's journey through exile.
“Lama is an emotionally nuanced writer. In the novel, ire and elucidation are finely balanced, underscoring ideas of unity and sacrifice. Mythological motifs are woven into the narrative. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies serves as a witness to the struggles of Tibetan exiles, and details unspoken interior lives shaped by geopolitical strife.”
—Quill & Quire
Tsering Yangzom Lama holds a BA in creative writing and international relations from the University of British Columbia, and an MFA from Columbia University. Born and raised in Nepal, Lama has lived in Toronto, New York City, and Vancouver, where she now resides. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is her first novel. It won the GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Toronto Book Award, and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
In The Sleeping Car Porter (Coach House Books), Suzette Mayr brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways.
“Mayr evokes the mystique of transcontinental travel and the tumult of lives on the margins in this much-anticipated period novel. All aboard!" —Oprah Daily
Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Award, and longlist nominee for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US and Canada). Mayr’s other novels have won the ReLit Award and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region, the Writers' Guild of Alberta's Best First Book and Best Novel Awards, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Mayr has done inter-disciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction, visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter, and she was a writer-in-residence at Widener University, Pennsylvania. She is a former President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. Mayr teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
In Elsewhere (Celadon Books), Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.
“A welcome addition to a shelf of speculative fiction about the joys, failures and metamorphoses involved in having a child, Elsewhere asks: Is motherhood, like the town itself, meant to be a featureless place, best experienced under a haze of collective brainwashing?" —The New York Times Book Review
Alexis Schaitkin is the author of Saint X. Her short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives in the Berkshires with her husband and their two children.
The Furrows (Hogarth) captures the uncanny experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea.
“A gorgeous, surreal meditation on identity and mourning, one that squeezes the heartstrings and rarely relaxes its grip.” —Vulture
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in New York. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The Furrows is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2022. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard.