Toronto –
Calgary writer Suzette Meyer was shortlisted for the first annual Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
The US$150,000 award celebrates excellence in fiction by women and non-binary authors from Canada and the United States.
Mayr participated in her historical novel “The Sleeping Car Porter,” which won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize last November.
In 1929, it was told from the perspective of a queer black station worker who stayed up all night to serve white passengers.
The remaining short list consists of US authors. Daphne Palasi Andreades in “Brown Girls,” Fatimah Asghar in “When We Were Sisters,” Talia Lakshmi Kolluri in “What We Fed to the Manticore,” and Alexis Schaitkin in “Elsewhere.” .”
Each runner-up will receive US$12,500. Awards will be presented at an event in Nashville on May 4th.
The Carroll Shields Prize, named after the Pulitzer Prize-winning Canadian-American author of The Stone Diaries, is touted as the largest literary purse for female authors.
Shields was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935 and immigrated to Canada in 1957. She died in Victoria in 2003 from complications of breast cancer at the age of 68.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on April 6, 2023.
