One Magnificant Prize You Need To Know About
Carol Shields Prize for fiction by women beginning in 2022
Bigger than the Pulitzer, the Booker, and the National Book Award
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction will debut in 2022 and offers a whopping $150,000 in Canadian dollars or $113,000 U.S. money annually to the winning woman or nonbinary author.
Wow. Other than the Nobel Prize in Literature which offers close to a million dollars reward, the new Carol Shields Prize dwarfs the other prominent book awards.
- The Pulitzer: “ For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000) prize.”
- The Booker: “Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. The winner receives £50,000, or about $65,000.”
- The National Book Award: “The National Book Awards were established in 1950 to celebrate the best writing in America. Since 1989, they have been overseen by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture. $10,000 award.”
The impetus for the prize
Susan Swan, a Canadian journalist began to research how gender affected the number of prizes and publicity in the literary field. What she found disturbed her. Although women writers are gaining strides, many of the major publications still favor male writers. She and a friend in the publishing world, Janice Zawerbny, proposed an award so big that people would pay attention to it. They hope that this prize will help balance the gender inequities between male and female writers.
Who was Carol Shields?
If you read The Stone Diaries, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1995, you probably remember the name of Carol Shields. She was born in Northern Illinois, educated at Hanover College, a small liberal-arts school in Indiana, and moved to Canada after her marriage where she taught, raised five children, and wrote poetry, short stories and novels for the rest of her life.
The Stone Diaries was an interesting combination of diary entries, newspaper clippings, and lists that captured the essence of an everyday, ordinary woman whose life spanned a century. One of the things that I most remember was a list she had created of the places she had lived. (I thought of it as a great creative writing exercise to write down addresses and memories of each.) While my memory is murky this many years after reading The Stone Diaries, (and I think my response is included in my missing book journal #1) I remember marveling at her technique of inventorying events, memories, and details of the narrator’s life throughout the book.
Carol Shields died in 2003 from breast cancer at the age of 68.
How to Qualify to Win
- Publish a book in English in Canada or the United States, with translations from French or Spanish being eligible
- Be a current resident of Canada or the United States with five years of prior residence
- Confirm your willingness to serve as a mentor to younger writers if you win
In addition to the winner, four women finalists will also be awarded significant financial prizes, approximately $9,400 U.S. or 12,500 in Canadian money.
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is a prestigious award that will bolster careers — and financial status — of notable women writers.
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