2026 Shields Prize Longlist
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2026 Shields Prize Longlist 🔹
The Edge of Water (Tin House) by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Author photo ©️ Malak Yassin
“I was stunned to receive news that The Edge of Water had been longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. At a time when immigrants in the US are being ripped from their longstanding homes and travel from African countries to the US is increasingly restricted, it is especially meaningful to have this notable award recognize a novel that is centered in large part on the inextricable cultural and spiritual connections between an American city like New Orleans and a Nigerian one like Ibadan. I’m grateful to tell the stories of these several women—determined and courageous—traversing myriad worlds, circumstances, and challenges, while tending each other’s humanity. Thank you to the Carol Shields Prize and the jurors for this great honor. My heartiest congratulations to all of the authors on the longlist!”
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. The Edge of Water (Tin House Books), her debut novel, longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, is the winner of the Westport Prize for Literature, winner of the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a Best Book of the Year at TIME, Apple, Debutiful, Electric Literature, Chicago Review of Books, Well-Read Black Girl, and more. It has been widely praised, including by Oprah Daily, Goodreads, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Brittle Paper, The Root, and The Lagos Review. The Edge of Water has also been named Finalist for the New American Voices Award and the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Bankole's work has appeared in various publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a residency-fellowship from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.
The Edge of Water
In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to go, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew and the Nigerian family she has yet to discover.
Exploring the love of a mother and daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late; the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore; and three generations of daring women—The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.