Canisia Lubrin’s novel Code Noir was declared the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2025 winner in Chicago, USA, on Thursday, May 1, 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 as well as 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 comprised Diana Abu-Jaber (Chair), Norma Dunning, Kim Fu, Tessa McWatt, and Jeanne Thornton. They announced the longlist on March 6 before the shortlist was made public on April 3. Canisia Lubrin was declared the winner of the award, which comes with a US$150,000 cash prize, at a ceremony at the Chicago History Museum on Thursday.
The jury said, “Code Noir contains multitudes. Its characters inhabit multi-layered landscapes of the past, present and future, confronting suffering, communion and metamorphosis. Canisia Lubrin’s prose is polyphonic; the stories invite you to immerse yourself in both the real and the speculative, in the intimate and in sweeping moments of history. Riffing on the Napoleonic decree, Lubrin retunes the legacies of slavery, colonialism and violence. This is a virtuoso collection that breaks new ground in short fiction.”
Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction Code Noir 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.”
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