Poet Canisia Lubrin at the Toronto office of publisher Penguin Random House Canada ahead of the release of her debut fiction novel Code Noir on Jan. 23, 2024.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
The first time is a charm for Canadian poet Canisia Lubrin, whose debut novel, Code Noir, has earned her the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
The English-language literary award, named in honour of the late American-Canadian novelist and open to women and non-binary authors from those two countries, is worth US$150,000.
Lubrin is an assistant professor at the University of Guelph and poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. She received the prize at an event Thursday evening at the Chicago History Museum, in Shields’s hometown.
The winning book is based on Le Code Noir (the Black Code), an infamous suite of historical decrees passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had 59 articles; Code Noir has the same number of linked stories.
The five-member jury praised Lubrin for recalibrating the legacies of slavery, colonialism and violence: “This is a virtuoso collection that breaks new ground in short fiction.”
The author, a Saint Lucia native who lives in Whitby, Ont., won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection, The Dyzgraphxst.
Code Noir, which is accompanied by black-and-white drawings from U.S. visual artist Torkwase Dyson, was published by Knopf Canada and Brooklyn-based Soft Skull Press. The Globe and Mail praised the “lush symphony” of Black stories as “brilliant, challenging and ecstatic.”
A year ago, Lubrin spoke to The Globe about the kaleidoscopic nature of the novel: “I wanted to be omnidirectional. I wanted to move in the future, come back into the present, move sideways into the past. I mean, story is a continuous material. It’s constantly evolving.”
The Carol Shields Prize was created by two Canadians, editor Janice Zawerbny and author Susan Swan. “My hope is that the prize will boost the profile and incomes of a large number of women writers, that it will function as a permanent historical record of brilliant work by women fiction authors,” Swan said at the time.
The previous winners are Fatimah Asghar (for When We Were Sisters) and V. V. Ganeshananthan (for Brotherless Night).
Lubrin is the first Canadian recipient. The prize comes with a perk: a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn in Joe Batt’s Arm, N.L., where rooms with meals start at $3,000 a night.
The cross-border jury consisted of chairperson Diana Abu-Jaber and Norma Dunning, Kim Fu, Tessa McWatt and Jeanne Thornton. The other finalists (Dominique Fortier and translator Rhonda Mullins, Miranda July, Sarah Manguso and Aube Rey Lescure) each receive US$12,500.
The finalists and the winner earned an invitation to a group retreat residency in the Leighton Artist Studios, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
