American author Diana Abu-Jaber to chair jury for $215K Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
The North American prize is the largest prize celebrating women and non-binary authors
American writer Diana Abu-Jaber will chair the five-person jury for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
The other jury members are Canadian authors Tessa McWatt, Kim Fu and Norma Dunning and American author Jeanne Thornton.
The Carol Shields Prize awards $150,000 U.S. (approx. $215,013 Cdn) to a single work of fiction by a woman or non-binary writer. Each of the four finalists receives $12,500 U.S. (approx. $17,913 Cdn).
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is open to English-language books published in the U.S. or Canada, including translations from Spanish and French. Writers must be citizens or permanent residents of Canada or the U.S.
Abu-Jaber is the author of novels including Fencing With the King, Birds of Paradise and Origin and memoirs Life Without A Recipe and The Language of Baklava. She is a professor at Portland State University and currently lives in Florida.
McWatt is the author of several works of fiction including novels Dragons Cry, Vital Signs and Higher Ed. Her work has been nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award and the City of Toronto Book Awards. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her memoir, Shame on Me, won the Eccles British Library Award and the Bocas Prize for Nonfiction. She is a professor at the University of East Anglia and splits her time between London, U.K., and Toronto.
Fu is the Vancouver-born author of two novels, For Today I Am a Boy and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, and the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, which won the Washington State
Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She has also written a poetry collection titled How Festive the Ambulance: Poems. She lives in Seattle.
Dunning is a Padlei Inuk writer and professor at the First Nations University of Canada. She is the author of Tainna, which won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, Kinauvit?, which was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, which won the 2018 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity. She lives in Regina.
Thornton is the Brooklyn writer of Summer Fun, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and The Black Emerald and The Dream of Dr. Bantam. Thornton also edited We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology with Tara Madison Avery. She is the senior editor at Feminist Press and the co-publisher of Instar Books. Her work has been published in n+1, WIRED, Harper's Bazaar and Evergreen Review.
The longlist will be revealed on March 6, the shortlist will be announced on April 3 and the winner will be revealed on May 1.
The Carol Shields Prize was founded by Susan Swan, Janice Zawerbny and Don Oravec.
Last year's winner was V. V. Ganeshananthan for Brotherless Night.
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.
