A new literary prize has been launched to raise the visibility of women writers. Named in honor of the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of “The Stone Diaries,” the Carol Shields Prize will award $150,000 to a female novelist. The annual honor was borne of a research project that exposed sexism.
“About eight years ago, the Canadian novelist Susan Swan looked into the research about how female writers compared with male ones when it came to literary prizes and coverage. She was shocked by what she found,” The New York Times details. “I thought it was going to be a happy progress report,” she recalls. “Instead it was a bad news day.”
Swan discovered that “books written by women were less likely to be reviewed or win the most prominent book awards,” and decided to join forces with a friend who works in book publishing, Janice Zawerbny, to help address the disparity. Together, they’ve launched the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, “which starting in 2022 will award $150,000 for a work of fiction published in the previous year by a woman or nonbinary person.” Four finalists will each receive $12,500.
“We wanted to go big on it so that people paid attention,” Swan explained. “I think it’s going to make a big difference to the lives of women writers, because it will boost their incomes and their profile.”
Mentorship will play a vital role in the prize. The winner “will be asked to select another writer to mentor and work with on writing fellowships,” the source reveals.
“Books published in English in the United States and Canada will be eligible, including those translated from Spanish or French. Writers must be citizens and current residents, for at least five years, of the United States or Canada. The winner and finalists will be selected by a judging panel that will include one writer each from the United States, Canada, and another country,” the NYT reveals.
Shields, whose other books include Orange Prize winner “Larry’s Party,” died in 2003 from complications from breast cancer. Zawerbny and Swan decided to name the prize for her because “of her dual Canadian and United States citizenship and the way her work centered domestic life, something Swan said has often been wrongly dismissed as lightweight or unimportant by male critics.”
Check out a 1987 video of Shields discussing how homemaking is a legitimate topic for novels, despite what some of her male critics claimed.
