2025 LONGLIST
2025 LONGLIST
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction’s longlist includes 15 unforgettable works of fiction by women writers in the U.S. and Canada, spanning novels, short story collections, and fiction in translation.
The shortlist will be revealed on April 3.
On May 1, one of these writers will be awarded the $150,000 USD grand prize at an award ceremony in Chicago.
Longlist selections were made by a Jury of esteemed writers:
Diana Abu-Jaber (Jury Chair), Norma Dunning, Kim Fu, Tessa McWatt, and Jeanne Thornton.
In addition to the grand prize, the Winner will receive a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn. Each of the four Finalists will receive $12,500 USD.
The prize is generously supported by BMO.
Eliza Barry Callahan
The Hearing Test (Catapult)
V Efua Prince
Kin: Practically True Stories (Wayne State University Press)
Anne Fleming
Curiosities (Knopf Canada)
Dominique Fortier
Pale Shadows, translated by Rhonda Mullins (Coach House Books)
Miranda July
All Fours (Riverhead Books)
Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Oonya Kempadoo
Naniki (Rare Machines)
Rachel Kushner
Creation Lake (Scribner)
Canisia Lubrin
Code Noir (Knopf Canada/Soft Skull Press)
Sarah Manguso
Liars (Hogarth)
Erica McKeen
Cicada Summer (W. W. Norton & Company)
Julia Phillips
Bear (Hogarth)
Aube Rey Lescure
River East, River West (William Morrow)
O.O. Sangoyomi
Masquerade (Forge)
Sharon Wahl
Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (University of Iowa Press)
“It has been a joy and an honor to select these outstanding books for The Carol Shields Prize longlist. Each of these works is extraordinary and original, showing us the path forward, out of suppression, into humanity and liberation.”
Meet the 2025 Longlisted Nominees
The Hearing Test (Catapult)
When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in New York City.
Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.
The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.
Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer, filmmaker, and musician from New York, NY. Her work has appeared in BOMB, frieze, The Drift and elsewhere. She co-wrote the short film “BUST” which premiered at Sundance in 2024. She is a New York Foundation for The Arts Fellow and she teaches at Columbia University. The Hearing Test, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, is her first novel.
Kin (Wayne State University Press )
Kin is a story and a celebration of Black womanhood, of resistance, and of perseverance—while simultaneously an indictment of American history. Kin is a tree—alive in places, broken in others—that others shelter for women seeking respite in the midst of family-making. This tree depicts family grafted together by blood, law, or choice; its stories are voiced through blues-infused poetry, one-act plays, oral history, and reportage that are combined to form an orchestra of Black history and re-memory.
Centered on the labor of women, the movement of women through lives and time, and the work of building associations that make up the home, this book takes up the rhythms and multifarious forms of its inspiration, Cane, the 1923 novel by Jean Toomer. The roots from which it all grows are the ancestors who ensure from the spirit realm that the family remains grounded and verdant, despite the manifold threats to its health and well-being.
Kin is a tribute to forebearers, a beacon to those calling homes into being, and a strata of stories for children not yet born.
V Efua Prince is a professor of African American studies at Wayne State University who specializes in themes of home, women, housework, and metaphor in African American literature. She has previously served as a W. E. B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University; a visiting scholar at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia; and Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University. Her first book, Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature, was recognized by Academia as a university press bestseller. Kin: Practically True Stories was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Curiosities (Knopf Canada)
This sparkling, genre-bending novel opens with amateur historian Anne, who has a passion for research into the murkier corners of England in the 1600s. In an archive, Anne has stumbled across an obscure memoir, one that hints at an intricate tapestry of secret lives and loves.
The full story eventually weaves together five manuscripts, each a different thread in the same strange tale: The Plague descends upon a village, and two children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors. They bond with each other and with "Old Nut," a woman who lives in the forest nearby. But when relatives return, Old Nut is accused of witchcraft and condemned to death. Joan is hired as a maid to well-educated Lady Margaret Long—and, being lively and curious, soon becomes a beloved companion. Thomasina is sent on a perilous voyage to Virginia, where she adopts boys' clothing and navigates life as a male.
Years later, Tom and Joan find each other and fall in love—but are discovered, naked, by a clergyman. Horrified, he believes there can only be one explanation for Tom's "unmanned" state: Joan is a witch and, like Old Nut years ago, must be tried for sorcery. It falls upon Anne, reading between faded pages and centuries, to uncover the fate of the lovers—and add her own contemporary line of "truth" to this tale from a time when there were no labels for who Tom and Joan might be.
Anne Fleming is the author of Curiosities, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction; Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; and the novel Anomaly, published to widespread acclaim. Her middle-grade novel, The Goat, was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection, shortlisted for Italy's Premio Strega, optioned for film, and named one of the Top Ten Children's Books of the Year by the New York Public Library and The Wall Street Journal. Anne Fleming lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Pale Shadows (Coach House Books)
Dickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows.
When she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of paper. She also left behind three formidable women: her steadfast sister, Lavinia; her brother’s ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd; and his grief-stricken wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. With no clear instructions from Emily, these three women would, through mourning and strife, make from those scraps of paper a book that would change American literature.
From the author of Paper Houses, this is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author.
In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson’s poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.
Dominique Fortier is a novelist and translator. Her novel Les ombres blanches (Pale Shadows) translated by Rhonda Mullins, was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She has translated major Canadian voices, including Anne Michaels, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, and Heather O’Neill, and is a four-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation. Her translation of O’Neill’s The Lonely Hearts Hotel won the Cole Foundation Prize from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her first novel, Du bon usage des étoiles (On the Proper Use of Stars), was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and Au péril de la mer (The Island of Books) won the Governor General’s Award for French fiction. Les villes de papier (Paper Houses) won France’s Prix Renaudot – Essai. Fortier is a member of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco literary council. She divides her time between Montreal and Maine.
Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier’s And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois’s The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses and Pale Shadows, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning the award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. Novels she has translated were contenders for CBC Canada Reads in 2015 and 2019, and Suzanne was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.
All Fours (Riverhead Books)
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom.
Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and artist. Her debut novel, The First Bad Man, was an instant The New York Times bestseller, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel, All Fours, was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. July lives in Los Angeles.
Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press)
In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird, was listed among the top fifteen debut books of 2019 by Brittle Paper. Obligations to the Wounded was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, the Red Rock Review, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, Mubanga serves as fiction editor for Doek! and as mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Naniki (Rare Machines)
Through luminescent light, ancestral paths, and a Caribbean spirit-inflected world, Naniki explores the musings and inner workings of the deep blue — the Caribbean Sea — and its shape-shifting sea beings. As the sea mirrors the light from the blue skies, and its depths are exposed by daggers of sunlight, so too Naniki reveals and honours the Indigenous roots of the Caribbean and its people, whose destiny is tied to the sea, the vessel of collective memory.
Amana and Skelele are made of water and air, their essence intertwined with Taino and African ancestry. They evolved as elemental beings of the Anthropocene, and shape-shifting with their naniki (active spirits) or animal avatars, they begin an archipelagic journey throughout the Caribbean Basin to see the strange future they dreamed of. Until devastation erupts. Tasked by their elders to go back in time to the source of the First People’s knowledge, they must surmount historical and mythological challenges alike. How can they navigate and overcome these obstacles to regenerate themselves, their love, their islands, and their seas?
Oonya Kempadoo is the author of three novels and is critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Her novel Naniki was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award, and longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. A creative practitioner with an interest in cross-disciplinary dialogue, she is a citizen of England, Guyana, and Grenada, and currently lives in Montreal.
Creation Lake (Scribner)
A novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor. Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba; as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.
Code Noir (Knopf Canada/Soft Skull Press)
Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, this inventive, shape-shifting braid of stories exists far beyond the enclosures of official decrees. This is a timely, daring, virtuosic book by a young literary star. The stories are accompanied by black-and-white drawings—one at the start of each fiction—by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson.
Canisia Lubrin’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Award for Poetry and Governor General's Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell prize for poetry, and the Globe & Mail named her Poet of the Year. Code Noir, her debut fiction, was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and includes stories listed for the Journey Prize (2019, 2020), Toronto Book Award (2018) and the Shirley Jackson Award (2021). Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
Liars (Hogarth)
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.
When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.
As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.
Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including the novel Very Cold People, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Liars, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Manguso is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
Cicada Summer (W. W. Norton & Company)
In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They’re soon joined by Husha’s ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio.
Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother’s house. When she, Arthur, and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother’s last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing, and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.
Erica McKeen is the author of Tear, a novel that won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction and Cicada Summer, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she works as a teacher and librarian.
Bear (Hogarth)
Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can't earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.
Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it's time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.
Julia Phillips is the bestselling author of the novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year, and of Bear, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.
River East, River West (William Morrow)
Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.
1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young, married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Though he once dreamed of a bright future, he is one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life, and how much will ever be enough.
In a stunning reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative and set against China’s political history and economic rise, River East, River West is an intimate family drama and a sharp social novel. Alternating between Alva and Lu Fang’s points of view, this is a profoundly moving exploration of race and class, cultural identity and belonging, and the often-false promise of the American Dream.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China, and the south of France. After receiving her B.A. from Yale University, she worked in foreign policy and has co-authored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. She was the 2019 Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, a finalist for the 2018 Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence program, and an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. Her novel River East, River West was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, Best American Essays, The Florida Review online, WBUR, and more.
Masquerade (Forge)
Set in a wonderfully reimagined 15th century West Africa, Masquerade is a dazzling, lyrical tale exploring the true cost of one woman’s fight for freedom and self-discovery, and the lengths she’ll go to secure her future.
Òdòdó’s hometown of Timbuktu has been conquered by the warrior king of Yorùbáland, and living conditions for the women in her blacksmith guild, who were already shunned as social pariahs, grow even worse. Then Òdòdó is abducted. She is whisked across the Sahara to the capital city of Ṣàngótẹ̀, where she is shocked to discover that her kidnapper is none other than the vagrant who had visited her guild just days prior. But now that he is swathed in riches rather than rags, Òdòdó realizes he is not a vagrant at all; he is the warrior king, and he has chosen her to be his wife.
In a sudden change of fortune, Òdòdó soars to the very heights of society. But after a lifetime of subjugation, she finds the power that saturates this world of battle and political savvy too enticing to resist. As tensions with rival states grow, revealing elaborate schemes and enemies hidden in plain sight, Òdòdó must defy the cruel king she has been forced to wed by reforging the shaky loyalties of the court in her favor, or risk losing everything—including her life. Loosely based on the myth of Persephone, O.O. Sangoyomi’s Masquerade takes you on a journey of epic power struggles and political intrigue which turn an entire region on its head.
O.O. Sangoyomi is a Nigerian American author with a penchant for African mythology and history. During a childhood of constantly moving around within the U.S., she found an anchored home in the fictional worlds of books. Sangoyomi is a graduate of Princeton University, where she studied English and African American Studies. Masquerade, longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, is her debut novel.
Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (University of Iowa Press)
With a mixture of humor and reverence, Sharon Wahl hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The philosopher Wittgenstein helps us consider the limits of language: Does there exist an argument, a logical deduction, that will cause another person to love us? The philosopher Zeno’s laws of motion stipulate that we can only ever cross half of any distance. This principle is applied to a first date, where making a first move becomes more and more impossible because the movie this couple goes to see is a depressing mood-killer. A woman afraid of love applies Bentham’s utilitarian principles to find her perfect match, testing every man she meets until she finds one who aces every one of her tests. Nonetheless, she wonders: Is he right for her? Is she ready to fall in love forever? The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain.
Sharon Wahl is a writer and documentary film producer. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, Chicago Tribune, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Action/Spectacle, among others. Her short story collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances was longlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Wahl lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Find us on social media:
If you are in the U.S., click here to shop the longlist on Bookshop.org
via our affiliate link. We get a small percentage of every sale.