[Many thanks to Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture for sharing this news.] NPR’s Andrew Limbong reports on Canisia Lubrin’s recent win. She was awarded this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her debut short story collection Code Noir (2024).
Writer Canisia Lubrin, known for her poetry, has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which honors women and nonbinary storytellers in the U.S. and Canada.
Lubrin’s debut fiction work, 2024’s Code Noir, is a collection made up of 59 short stories – jumping off of Louis XIV’s “Black Code,” which established the rules of slavery in France and the French colonies.
“Canisia Lubrin’s prose is polyphonic,” wrote the prize judges in a statement announcing Lubrin’s win. “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.”
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is relatively new. Named after the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, it aims to increase literary visibility for books written by women and nonbinary authors. [. . .]
Canisia Lubrin: Writer, critic, editor, and teacher Canisia Lubrin grew up in St. Lucia. She studied at York University and earned an MFA at the University of Guelph. Lubrin is the author of the poetry collections The Dyzgraphxst (2020) and Voodoo Hypothesis (2017), which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her work has been translated into Italian and Spanish.
Lubrin was a 2019 writer-in-residence at Queens University and has taught in the English department at Humber College. She has worked as an arts administrator and a community advocate for nearly 20 years. She lives in Whitby, Ontario.
For full article, see https://www.npr.org/2025/05/01/nx-s1-5377339/canisia-lubrin-code-noir-carol-shields-book-prize
Also see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/canisia-lubrin
[Photo of Canisia Lubrin by Rachel Eliza Griffiths/Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.]
[Many thanks to Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture for sharing this news.] NPR’s Andrew Limbong reports on Canisia Lubrin’s recent win. She was awarded this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her debut short story collection Code Noir (2024). Writer Canisia Lubrin, known for her poetry, has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize
