The nominees for the first-ever Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, given to women and nonbinary writers in the U.S. and Canada, has been revealed. The prize’s organizers announced the longlist of 15 authors Wednesday morning.
Namwali Serpell made the longlist for her novel The Furrows, which is also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Suzette Mayr was nominated for her Giller Prize–winning The Sleeping Car Porter, as was Lisa Hsiao Chen for Activities of Daily Living, which was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for a debut novel.
Gish Jen was nominated for her story collection Thank You, Mr. Nixon, along with Daphne Palasi Andreades for Brown Girls, Fatimah Asghar for When We Were Sisters, Andrea Barrett for Natural History, Francine Cunningham for God Isn't Here Today, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine for Woman of Light.
Also making the longlist were Liana Finck for Let There Be Light, Emma Hooper for We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky, Chelene Knight for Junie, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri for What We Fed to the Manticore, Tsering Yangzom Lama for We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, and Alexis Schaitkin for Elsewhere.
This is the first year the Carol Shields Prize will be awarded; it was announced in 2020 and honors the late American Canadian author of novels including The Stone Diaries and Unless.
The shortlist for the award, which comes with a cash prize of $150,000, will be announced on April 6. The winner revealed in an event at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 4.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
