Reading and Workshop: Celebrating the 2024 Carol Shields Prize Shortlist

Reading and Workshop: Celebrating the 2024 Carol Shields Prize Shortlist

Join the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in honouring the five remarkable authors shortlisted for the 2024 Prize: Janika Oza (A History of Burning), V. V. Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night), Kim Coleman Foote (Coleman Hill), Claudia Dey (Daughter), and Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood).

Hosted by Carol Shields Prize Foundation Board Director Ian Williams, as well as University of Toronto’s Jim Polk/Carol Shields Prize Foundation Scholarship in Creative Writing recipients, Janielle Browne and Salima Tourkmani-MacDonald, the event will feature readings from the five shortlisted authors. Each of the readings will be accompanied by a writing prompt, and attendees will be given the opportunity to generate their own original writing. Pens and paper for attendees will be provided, donated by Presenting Sponsor BMO Financial Group.

Books will be for sale, and a signing will take place at the conclusion of the reading/workshop.

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 Canadian-American author Carol Shields, the Prize is managed by the Carol Shields Prize Foundation. The Foundation provides scholarships, bursaries, and other forms of financial assistance to women and non-binary writers, and offers mentoring programs, salons, and residencies for the benefit of these writers and the general public. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction—co-founded by author Susan Swan C.M., editor Janice Zawerbny, and arts activist Don Oravec—was founded in 2012, and presented its inaugural award in 2023.

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 (U.S.), and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (UK).

Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestsellers Birnam Wood, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Orwell Prize, and the Ockham Book Award, and The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, and the NZ Society of Authors’ Best First Book Award. Catton was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2023. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Born in London, Ontario, and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.

Claudia Dey’s most recent novel, Daughter, was an instant national bestseller, named a New York Times Fall Fiction pick, an Elle Magazine Book of the Year, and a Globe and Mail Best Book. She is also the author of Heartbreaker, a Northern Lit and Trillium Book Award finalist, currently being adapted for television. Her plays have been produced internationally, and nominated for the Governor General’s, Dora and Trillium Book Awards. Dey has worked as a film actress, a guest artist at the National Theatre School, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Her fiction, interviews, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review ("Mothers As Makers of Death"), McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Vogue, Hazlitt, The Believer, and elsewhere.

Kim Coleman Foote was born and raised in New Jersey, where she started writing fiction at the age of seven(ish). A recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has received additional fellowships from the NEA, NYFA, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, Center for Fiction, and Fulbright, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Missouri Review, The Literary Review, Kweli, and Obsidian. Coleman Hill is her first book.

V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Janika Oza is the author of the novel A History of Burning, winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She is the winner of a 2022 O. Henry Award and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. She lives in Toronto.

About the Hosts

Janielle Browne is a Vincentian writer and poet who has been writing since the age of eleven and is passionate about her faith, community work, creative arts, and education. After being awarded the University of the West Indies Open Scholarship, she attained a BA in Literatures in English with History and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education.

Janielle has since been published in IntersectAnu, ACalabash, and Canadian literary magazine Kola. Along with being shortlisted for the 2021 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Prize for Writers in the Caribbean, she won the 2019 St. Vincent and the Grenadines Independence Poetry Competition, 2021 H. Nigel Thomas Fiction prize, and placed third for the Shake Keane Elsworth Poetry Prize before winning the 2022 SVG Innovation Literary Competition. After teaching at the Bishop’s College Kingstown Secondary School for four years, Janielle is now in her first year pursuing a M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

Salima Tourkmani-MacDonald was born and raised in Riverview, New Brunswick, and received her B.A. in English Literature from St. Thomas University in Fredericton in 2022. She developed a passion for creative writing in high school, with a particular affinity for poetry. Since then, writing poetry has provided her with an outlet to express herself unapologetically and without interruption. Much of her work is inspired by lived experience, and hinges on themes of race, displacement, and family.

Ian Williams is the author of six books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His latest book, Disorientation, considers the impact of racial encounters on ordinary people. His novel, Reproduction, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Italy. His poetry collection, Word Problems, converts the ethical and political issues of our time into math and grammar problems. It won the Raymond Souster Award from the League of Canadian Poets. His previous collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Williams completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. After several years teaching poetry in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Williams returned to the University of Toronto as a tenured full professor of English, director of the Creative Writing program and academic advisor for the Massey College William Southam Journalism Fellowship. He was a former Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program and has held many other posts, including Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris.

The award for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is generously presented by BMO Financial Group.

Host or Publisher Carol Shields Prize for Fiction