Calgary’s Suzette Mayr on short list for US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

TORONTO – Calgary author Suzette Mayr has been shortlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

The US$150,000 award celebrates excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.

Mayr made the cut for her historical novel “The Sleeping Car Porter,” which won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize last November.

It’s told from the perspective of a queer Black train porter who stays up all night to serve white passengers in 1929.

The rest of the short list is comprised of U.S. authors: Daphne Palasi Andreades for “Brown Girls’,” Fatimah Asghar for “When We Were Sisters,” Talia Lakshmi Kolluri for “What We Fed to the Manticore” and Alexis Schaitkin for “Elsewhere.”

Each runner-up gets US$12,500. The award will be handed out at an event in Nashville on May 4.

The Carol Shields prize is named after the Pulitzer Prize-winning Canadian-American author of “The Stone Diaries” and is touted as the largest literary purse for women writers.

Shields was born in Oak Park, Ill., in 1935 and moved to Canada in 1957. She died from complications of breast cancer in Victoria in 2003, at age 68.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2023.

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