Canisia Lubrin’s novel Code Noiris is on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2025 shortlist, announced on Thursday, April 3, 2025.
Carol Shields was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the US Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Governor General’s Award in Canada. She passed away in 2003.
In 2020, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, an annual literary award recognising the best fiction written by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States, was set up in her honour. The first winner given in 2023 was Fatimah Asghar followed by V. V. Ganeshananthan in the following year.
The 2025 jury comprises Diana Abu-Jaber (Chair), Norma Dunning, Kim Fu, Tessa McWatt, and Jeanne Thornton. This panel announced the longlist on March 6 before the shortlist, which includes Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir, published by Knopf Canada/Soft Skull Press, was made public on April 3.
Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction comes with the blurb, “a rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.”
The winner, who will get a US$150,000 cash prize, will be announced publicly at a ceremony in Chicago, USA, on May 1. Each shortlistee will receive US$12,500.
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