Eleanor Catton is among the five North American authors shortlisted for the second iteration of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
The $150,000 USD ($203,971.50 Cdn) prize recognizes the best fiction book by a woman or non-binary writer from the U.S. and Canada. It is presently the largest international literary prize for women writers. Each of the four remaining finalists will receive $12,500 U.S. ($16,997.62 Cdn).
Catton is shortlisted for her novel Birnam Wood, which was also a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The other Canadian finalists are Claudia Dey for Daughter and Janika Oza for A History of Burning.
Birnam Wood is an engaging eco-thriller set in the middle of a landslide in New Zealand. Mira, the founder of a guerilla gardening collective that plants crops amid other criminal environmental activities, sets her sights on an evacuated farm as a way out of financial ruin. The only problem is the American billionaire Robert Lemoine has already laid claim to it as his end-of-the-world lair. After the same thing for polar opposite reasons, their paths cross and Robert makes Mira an offer that would stave off her financial concerns for good. The question is: can she trust him?
Catton is a London, Ont.-born New Zealand author. She won the 2013 Booker Prize for fiction and the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction for her second novel, The Luminaries.
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In 2013, Canadian-born, New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton made history when she became the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize. Catton was just 28 and her novel, The Luminaries, went on to become an international bestseller. Catton later adapted her novel for a BBC-TV mini-series and wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film production of Jane Austen’s Emma. Now, her much anticipated new novel, Birnam Wood, a page-turning eco-thriller set in New Zealand’s South Island, tackles some of the biggest issues of our time, including the climate crisis, digital surveillance and economic inequality.
Dey’s Daughter explores the regenerative power of art, and how making art is making selfhood, when Mona Dean strives to make a life and art of her own. The story is about a playwright, actress and titular daughter named Mona Dean, who is caught in her charismatic father’s web — a man famous for one great novel and whose needs and insecurities have a hold on the women in the family.
Dey is a Toronto author, playwright and actor. She is also the co-designer of women’s clothing brand Horses Atelier. She is also the author of the novels Stunt and Heartbreaker.
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Award-winning Toronto author Claudia Dey talks with Ryan B. Patrick about her novel Daughter, which explores the tumultuous relationship between Mona Dean, an actress and playwright, and her unreliable writer father.
Oza’s A History of Burning is an epic novel about how one act of rebellion can influence a family for generations. It’s 1898 and a 13-year-old boy in India named Pirbhai needs to make money to support his family and ends up inadvertently being sent across the ocean to be a labourer for the British. He has a choice to make and what he does will change the course of his life, and his family’s fate, for years to come. The story takes readers to Uganda, India, England and Canada in the wake of Pirbhai’s choice as the novel explores the impacts of colonialism, resistance, exile and the power of family.
Oza is a writer based in Toronto. She won the 2019 Malahat Review Open Season Award in fiction for her short story Exile, the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award and the 2022 O. Henry Award.
Oza made the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for her story The Gift of Choice, which is a chapter in A History of Burning.
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Ryan B. Patrick interviews Janika Oza about her debut novel, A History of Burning.
The two American finalists are Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote and Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan.
The 2024 jury includes writers Jen Sookfong Lee, Eden Robinson, Laila Lalami, Claire Messud and Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
The winner will be revealed on May 13.
Last year’s winner was Fatimah Asghar for When We Were Sisters. Calgary writer Suzette Mayr was shortlisted for The Sleeping Car Porter, which won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Planning for the prize began back in 2012 after Swan participated in a discussion of the status of women in writing on a panel that included Kate Mosse, who established the U.K. Women’s Prize for Fiction and Australian writer Gail Jones. It was moderated by Shields’s daughter Anne Giardini.
Looking at statistics generated by arts organizations like VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Canadian Women in Literary Arts (CWILA), Swan found that women writers were being reviewed in publications far less than their male counterparts.
The historical numbers for major literary awards are particularly dismal — only 15 women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1910 and about a third of the winners of Canada’s oldest literary prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, have been women.
Shields, the prize’s namesake, was one of Canada’s best-known writers.
Her books include the novels The Stone Diaries, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 1992 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993, Larry’s Party and Unless. She died in 2003.
