PRESS RELEASE: Announcing the Jury for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction awards $200,000 USD in prize money annually, making it the largest literary prize for women and non-binary authors in the world. Today, it announces its esteemed Jury of international authors for the 2024 Prize.
The Jury for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction: Jen Sookfong Lee (Jury Chair; Top), Laila Lalami (Top Left), Claire Messud (Top Right), Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Bottom Left), and Eden Robinson (Bottom Right).
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, now entering its second year, is the first major English-language literary prize to celebrate creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States. Every year, it awards $150,000 USD to its winner, and $12,500 USD to each of its four finalists, making it the largest prize for women and non-binary authors globally. In addition to the monetary award, the Prize offers exceptional residency and mentorship opportunities for its winners and other writers. The Prize award is generously supported by BMO Financial Group.
This year’s Jury includes:
Jen Sookfong Lee, Jury Chair (Superfan, The Conjoined, The Better Mother)
Laila Lalami (The Moor’s Account, The Other Americans, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits)
Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children, The Woman Upstairs, The Burning Girl)
Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Take My Hand, Balm, Wench)
Eden Robinson (Son of a Trickster, Traplines, Monkey Beach)
“These five writers represent some of the best of literature in Canada and the United States, and we are honored that they have made the commitment to spend a year with the Carol Shields Prize Foundation to read, discuss, and celebrate books written by women and non-binary writers in 2023,” said Alexandra Skoczylas, CEO of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. “We thank them for their immeasurable contributions to exceptional fiction and the mandate of the Prize, and look forward to the results of their deliberations.”
Of this year’s submissions, Jury Chair Jen Sookfong Lee, shared: “This year, our Jury had the great pleasure of reading remarkable and incendiary works of fiction from women and non-binary writers from across Canada and the United States, books that truly represent the stories that need to be told, the stories we haven't heard before, and the stories that will lead us forward. We are looking forward to a grand celebration at the 2024 Prize ceremony.”
2024 Prize Announcement Schedule:
Longlist Announcement: Friday, March 8, 2024 (International Women’s Day)
Shortlist Announcement: Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Prize Winner Announcement: Monday, May 13, 2024
About The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is the first major English-language literary award to celebrate creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States. Named after beloved author Carol Shields, the Prize is managed by the Carol Shields Prize Foundation, which encourages participation of women in the literary arts. The Foundation provides scholarships, residencies, bursaries, and other forms of financial assistance to women and non-binary writers to support the production of high-quality literary works, and offers mentoring programs, seminars, conferences, and workshops on a variety of topics related to women in literature, for the benefit of writers and the general public. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction—co-founded in 2012 by author Susan Swan, C.M., editor Janice Zawerbny, and arts activist Don Oravec—awarded its first prize in 2023.
For more information, go to carolshieldsprizeforfiction.com.
About Carol Shields
Carol Shields was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, and moved to Canada in 1957 after her marriage. She was the author of more than twenty books, including novels, plays, poetry, essays, criticism, short fiction, and biography. Her books were nominated, and won, numerous international prizes. Most notably, her novel The Stone Diaries won the Governor General's Literary Award (Canada), the Pulitzer Prize (US), and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (UK). In 1997, her novel Larry’s Party won the Orange Prize (now called the Women's Prize for Fiction) which is given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. She edited, along with Marjorie Anderson, two highly successful anthologies of essays by women called Dropped Threads, in which women wrote about private and personal experiences that they hadn’t shared with others before. In addition to her career as an author, Shields worked as an academic, teaching at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba. In 1996, she became chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She raised five children with her husband, Don, and died from complications of breast cancer in Victoria, B.C., in 2003, at the age of sixty-eight.
The awards for the winner and finalists of the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
are generously presented by BMO Financial Group.
For U.S. media inquiries contact:
Carisa Hays, Carisa Hays Public Relations
carisa@carisahayspublicrelations.com
For Canadian media enquiries contact:
Nicole Magas, Zg Stories
nicole@zgstories.com or +1 778 697 1394
