SHORTLIST
SHORTLIST
The 2024 Shortlist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
The 2024 shortlisted authors are Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood), Claudia Dey (Daughter),
Kim Coleman Foote (Coleman Hill), V. V. Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night),
and Janika Oza (A History of Burning).
One of these writers will win the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, receiving $150,000 USD and a residency with Fogo Island Inn. Each runner-up will receive $12,500 USD. All of the monetary awards are generously presented by BMO Financial Group.
The winner will be announced on May 13.
The awards for the The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction are generously provided by BMO Financial Group.
The 2024 Shortlist
“Shakespearean in its ambition, with a large cast of characters, Birnam Wood manages to be both a nuanced psychological novel and a cultural satire of New Zealand’s contemporary contradictions, tackling climate change, environmental activism (the book’s title–from Macbeth, of course–is the name of a ‘guerrilla gardening collective’), and the fatal inequities of late capitalism. Eleanor Catton is a superlative prose stylist: her sentences exhilarate and delight. Witty, often scathing, and painfully emotionally accurate, this brilliant novel surprises to the last.” —2024 JURY CITATION
Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster has created an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.
For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira, Birnam Wood’s founder, stumbles on an answer: occupying the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. The enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira and Birnam Wood, he makes them an offer that would set them up for the long term. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. It is an unflinching look at the surprising consequences of even our most well-intended actions, and an enthralling consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestsellers Birnam Wood, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Orwell Prize, and the Ockham Book Award, and The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, and the NZ Society of Authors’ Best First Book Award. Catton was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2023. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Born in London, Ontario, and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.
“Daughter is a literary stick of dynamite–incendiary and exposing painful truths about art, family, and systemic inequities. Claudia Dey writes about the fraught relationship between a woman and her novelist father, as she tries to build her own creative career in his shadow. Both a study of intimate manipulations and the trope of the male genius, Daughter is a novel that ricochets between uncomfortable emotions and social constructs with fearlessness and intent.”
—2024 JURY CITATION
To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.
So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, and in fruitless pursuit of the next, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a cold, cruel stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in his attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.
Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.
Claudia Dey’s most recent novel, Daughter, was an instant national bestseller, named a New York Times Fall Fiction pick, an Elle Magazine Book of the Year, and a Globe and Mail Best Book. She is also the author of Heartbreaker, a Northern Lit and Trillium Book Award finalist, currently being adapted for television. Her plays have been produced internationally, and nominated for the Governor General’s, Dora and Trillium Book Awards. Dey has worked as a film actress, a guest artist at the National Theatre School, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Her fiction, interviews, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review ("Mothers As Makers of Death"), McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Vogue, Hazlitt, The Believer, and elsewhere.
“Coleman Hill reveals, with extraordinary depth, the journey of two families from the South to North, and their interwoven stories of pain, loss, and triumph. Pushing the narrative boundaries of fiction and family memoir, Kim Coleman Foote writes in the tradition of "biomythography," a word coined by the late American poet and essayist Audre Lorde. Yet Kim Coleman Foote also claims new literary territory for how to piece together the fragments of the past. Formally inventive and emotionally captivating, this brilliant accomplishment will take its place among the best of its generation.” —2024 JURY CITATION
In 1916, during the early days of the Great Migration, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post–Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of Vauxhall, New Jersey. But the North possesses its own challenges and bigotries that will shape the fates of the women and their families over the next seventy years. Told through the voices of nine family members—their perspectives at once harmonious and contradictory—Coleman Hill is a penetrating multigenerational debut.
Within ten years of arriving in Vauxhall, both Celia and Lucy’s husbands are dead, and they turn to one another for support in raising their children far from home. Lucy’s gentleness sets Celia at ease, and Celia lends Lucy her fire when her friend wants to cower. Encouraged by their mothers’ friendship, their children’s lives become enmeshed as well. As the children grow into adolescence, two are caught in an impulsive act of impropriety, and Celia and Lucy find themselves at irreconcilable odds over who’s to blame. The ensuing fallout has dire consequences that reverberate through the next two generations of their families.
A stunning biomythography—a word coined by the late great writer Audre Lorde—Coleman Hill draws from the author’s own family legend, historical record, and fervent imagination to create an unforgettable new history. The result is a kaleidoscopic novel whose intergenerational arc emerges through a series of miniatures that contain worlds.
Kim Coleman Foote was born and raised in New Jersey, where she started writing fiction at the age of seven(ish). A recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has received additional fellowships from the NEA, NYFA, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, Center for Fiction, and Fulbright, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Missouri Review, The Literary Review, Kweli, and Obsidian. Coleman Hill is her first book.
“An ambitious and beautifully written novel, Brotherless Night explores how ordinary people can be swept up in political violence and, despite their best efforts, eventually be swallowed by it. Through her sensitively crafted characters, V. V. Ganeshananthan asks us to consider how history is told, whom it serves, and the many truths it leaves out. A magnificent book.” —2024 JURY CITATION
Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever.
Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.
V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
“Janika Oza boldly navigates her remarkable, symphonic debut through a century of displacement of four generations of an extended Indo-Ugandan family. A History of Burning transmutes these sweeping moments of history into a nuanced and layered tale of loss, rage, and transcendence with its unflinching gaze and layered landscapes to ultimately create a heartbreaking and joyous portrait of a family that has kept each other alive with stories.” —2024 JURY CITATION
India, 1898. Pirbhai is the thirteen-year-old breadwinner for his family when he steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. With no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.
Pirbhai’s children go on to thrive in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule. As the country moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai’s granddaughters—sisters Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya—come of age in a divided nation, each forging her own path for the future. Latika is an aspiring journalist with a fierce determination to fight for what she believes in. Mayuri’s ambitions will take her farther away from her family than she ever imagined. And fearless Kiya will have to bear the weight of their secrets.
Forced to flee Uganda during Idi Amin’s brutal expulsion of South Asians in 1972, the family must start their lives over again in Toronto. Then one day news arrives that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure a place of their own in the world.
A masterful and breathtakingly intimate saga of colonialism and exile, complicity and resistance, A History of Burning is a radiant debut about the stories our families choose to share—and those that remain unspoken.
Janika Oza is the author of the novel A History of Burning, winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She is the winner of a 2022 O. Henry Award and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. She lives in Toronto.