SHORTLIST
SHORTLIST
The 2025 Shortlist for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
The 2025 shortlisted authors are Dominique Fortier (Pale Shadows, translated by Rhonda Mullins), Miranda July (All Fours), Canisia Lubrin (Code Noir), Sarah Manguso (Liars), and Aube Rey Lescure (River East, River West).
One of these writers will win the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, receiving $150,000 USD and a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn. The other Finalists will receive $12,500 USD. Author and translator monetary award will be split according to our guidelines. The four Finalists and the Winner will be invited to participate in a group retreat residency in the Leighton Artist Studios, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
The winner will be announced on May 1 in Chicago.
All of the monetary awards are generously supported by BMO.
“Congratulations to these remarkable authors on behalf of everyone at The Carol Shields Prize Foundation. The five Finalists represent the finest in literary fiction from women and non-binary authors published in Canada and the United States in 2024. We are proud to support these authors in a time when our mission to amplify the voices of women and non-binary writers feels more vital than ever.”
The 2025 Shortlist
“Dominique Fortier takes the reader into the afterlife of Emily Dickinson’s family, those very few people who knew her personally: as a friend, a sister, a brother, and a niece. Pale Shadows (translated by Rhonda Mullins) is a scenic and tender visualization into the hearts of those who loved Emily as more than a writer. Fortier creates a world of transition and reconciliation while within the background an unexpected scheme is bubbling. Dickinson once wrote that, “Beauty is not caused. It is.” Fortier has brought those words to fruition.”
Pale Shadows (Coach House Books) by Dominique Fortier, translated by Rhonda Mullins
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 shortlisted 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. 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, shortlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. 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.
“In this novel of slow transformations—of a hotel room, of a relationship and a marriage, of one’s body in time—July balances inventiveness and agility with a mature and thoughtful urgency, one that asks big questions: what do we owe to the people who intersect our lives, changing their trajectory? How will we move from individual sadness to a broader, shared struggle? All Fours addresses these with wit and delight, whether one is a Parker, a Driver, or anyone in between.”
All Fours (Riverhead Books) by Miranda July
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 shortlisted 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.
“Code Noir contains multitudes. Its characters inhabit multi-layered landscapes of the past, present and future, confronting suffering, communion and metamorphosis. Canisia Lubrin’s prose is polyphonic; the stories invite you to immerse yourself in both the real and the speculative, in the intimate and in sweeping moments of history. Riffing on the Napoleonic decree, Lubrin retunes the legacies of slavery, colonialism and violence. This is a virtuoso collection that breaks new ground in short fiction.”
Code Noir (Knopf Canada/Soft Skull Press) by Canisia Lubrin
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 Writer’s Trust of Canada prize, and others. Lubrin 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 shortlisted for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario.
“A firestorm of a story, Liars is delivered in a stark, uncompromising, and captivating voice. Sarah Manguso skillfully renders one woman’s freefall into marital betrayal, the experience of gaslighting, and the painful reconstruction of self while contemplating the tensions between motherhood and artistic creation. This ruthlessly honest, unblinking look at subjugation and resistance will inspire and ignite readers as it speaks truth
to power.”
Liars (Hogarth) by Sarah Manguso
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, shortlisted 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.
“River East, River West casts a sophisticated and unsparing eye upon the tragedy and absurdity of modern Chinese history, through the shattered illusions and ambitions of its marvelously flawed characters. The intertwined stories of Alva, a teenager in 2007 Shanghai, and Lu Fang, who begins a fateful connection with Alva’s American mother in 1985 Qingdao, upend familiar narratives of immigrant and multiracial experience, precisely attuned to precarious and irreducibly complex intersections of race, culture, and class. This is a cinematic, subversive, deftly constructed, era-defining novel.”
River East, River West (William Morrow) by Aube Rey Lescure
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, and an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. Her novel River East, River West was shortlisted 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.
On May 1, 2025, we are hosting a public reading at Women and Children First in Chicago to celebrate the 2025 list. Click here to RSVP.
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