Suzette Mayr, Tsering Yangzom Lama among Canadians nominated for Carol Shields Prize

TORONTO – Suzette Mayr, Tsering Yangzom Lama and Emma Hooper are among the Canadian authors longlisted 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 is nominated for her Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel “The Sleeping Car Porter,” while Lama received the nod for her Giller-shortlisted book “We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies.”

Hooper is longlisted for “We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky,” while fellow Canadians Francine Cunningham and Chelene Knight are nominated for “God Isn’t Here Today” and “Junie,” respectively.

Also nominated are American authors Daphne Palasi Andreades for “Brown Girls,” Fatimah Asghar for “When We Were Sisters,” Andrea Barrett for “Natural History: Stories,” and Lisa Hsiao Chen for “Activities of Daily Living.”

Rounding out the longlist are Gish Jen for “Thank You, Mr. Nixon,” Talia Lakshmi Kolluri for “What We Fed to the Manticore,” Alexis Schaitkin for “Elsewhere” and Namwali Serpell for “The Furrows: A Novel.”

Organizers tout the prize, which was named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Canadian-American author, as the largest literary purse for women writers.

The five shortlisted authors are to be announced April 6, and the award will be handed out at an event in Nashville on May 4.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 8, 2023.

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