SHORTLIST
SHORTLIST
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is proud to announce the shortlisted writers for the 2023 Prize, one of whom will be awarded the $150,000 USD grand prize, presented by BMO.
This shortlist includes Daphne Palasi Andreades, Fatimah Asghar, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Suzette Mayr and Alexis Schaitkin.
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, also presented by BMO. The winner of the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction will be announced live on May 4 through a special livestreamed event at Ann Patchett’s Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee. Viewers can watch the livestream via this website at 6.30pm CT. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified.
2023 Finalists
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (Random House)
“Written with engaging, lyrical prose and a choir of unforgettable voices, this highly original debut novel follows brown girls of different ethnicities as they move through their lives in Queens, New York. Reminiscent of classic girlhood anthems, the novel follows Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and others through adolescence with all its tenderness and complications. These girls—the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil...—blossom into womanhood under Daphne Palasi Andreades’s sure hand. Characters mature through all of life’s stages, grow apart, leave and return to each other and their beloved Queens. Andreades uses the ear and heart of a poet, beckoning us to read passages aloud, so that we can commit the lives of these young women to memory, even as we try to navigate our own.”
—JURY CITATION
If you really want to know, we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil . . .
Welcome to Queens, New York, where streets echo with languages from all over the globe, subways rumble above dollar stores, trees bloom and topple over sidewalks, and the funky scent of the Atlantic Ocean wafts in from Rockaway Beach. Within one of New York City’s most vibrant and eclectic boroughs, young women of color like Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and countless others, attempt to reconcile their immigrant backgrounds with the American culture in which they come of age. Here, they become friends for life—or so they vow.
A blazingly original debut novel told by a chorus of unforgettable voices, Brown Girls illustrates a collective portrait of childhood, adulthood, and beyond, and is a striking exploration of female friendship, a powerful depiction of women of color attempting to forge their place in the world today. For even as the conflicting desires of ambition and loyalty, freedom and commitment, adventure and stability risk dividing them, it is to one another—and to Queens—that the girls ultimately return.
When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar (One World)
“A debut novel written by a skilled, assured hand, When We Were Sisters absolutely dazzles. Following three orphaned Muslim American siblings as they navigate great loss and painful comings of age, Fatimah Asghar weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems, their fragility a mere guise for their complete, unflinching indestructibility. Noreen, Aisha, and Kausar show us what they truly need to survive, even when everything seems taken away. Asghar's novel is a tour de force, at once stirring and beautiful, breathtaking in its lyricism, and head-turning in its experimentations.”
—JURY CITATION
“Haunting . . . a knife-sharp story of self-discovery.”—People
In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, the acclaimed author of If They Come for Us traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of their parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her “crybaby” younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.
As Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency that she’s known or carve out a new path for herself. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in one another.
What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (Tin House)
“In prose that is both restrained and mesmerizing, What We Fed to the Manticore, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut short story collection, features a cast of animal narrators, each with a compelling consciousness, history, life story, and—most chillingly—an uncertain future, made precarious by the wars and destructions, environmental and otherwise, that the human species in their midst have blindly and selfishly waged. Deeply intelligent, Kolluri’s stories revel in fiction’s finest superpower—the creation of impossible, improbable narratives that, nonetheless, invite readers to believe and discover within them resounding truths.”
—JURY CITATION
A collection of fables for the 21st century. —BOMB
Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri’s pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelope that perished in Central Asia. A beloved donkey’s loyalty to a zookeeper in Gaza is put to the ultimate test. And a wounded pigeon in Delhi finds an unlikely friend.
In striking, immersive detail against the backdrop of an ever-changing international landscape, What We Fed to the Manticore speaks to the fears and joys of the creatures we share our world with, and ultimately places the reader under the rich canopy of the tree of life.
The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (Coach House Books)
“In The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr illuminates a shadowed corner of the mythic transcontinental railways that stitched early 20th-century North America. With humor, insight, and prose that evokes both the rhythm of the train and the frenetic, sleepless life of its porters, Mayr creates characters who are literally stopped in their tracks by a force of nature—a mudslide that wreaks havoc with the passengers’ lives. Central to the journey is Baxter, a gay Black porter who is at once iconic and deeply human, a man who transcends his own time and place to painfully and beautifully inform our own.”
—JURY CITATION
When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair
The Sleeping Car Porter 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. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.”
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin (Celadon Books)
“Impossible to put down until the devastating last page, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin is a haunting, richly imagined examination of what it means to be a mother and to belong to someone and somewhere. In shimmering prose, Schaitkin brilliantly uses the conventions of speculative fiction to evoke a surreal world where motherhood is both the pinnacle of achievement and the thing most feared. In an unnamed town high in the mountains, hemmed in by white clouds that appear every day at dusk, young mothers live under the constant threat of a mysterious affliction that causes them to disappear abruptly and without trace. Through the trope of motherhood, Elsewhere reveals with disturbing accuracy how a community shapes itself and how it closes ranks against ‘the other.’”
—JURY CITATION
Richly emotive and darkly captivating, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.
Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. This town, fiercely protective, brutal and unforgiving in its adherence to tradition, faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish, disappearing into the clouds. It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives; it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning.
Vera, a young girl when her own mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. Reveling in their gossip, they witness each other in motherhood, waiting for signs: this one devotes herself to her child too much, this one not enough—that must surely draw the affliction’s gaze. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she disappear?