Carol Shields

Carol Shields (1935-2003), Canadian American novelist, whose works deal with what she has called “the texture of ordinary life.” Writing about simple people and the emotional crises of their lives, Shields was awarded the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries (published in Canada, 1993; published in the United States, 1994).

Carol Ann Warner was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She received a B.A. degree from Hanover College in Indiana in 1957, the same year that she married Donald Shields and moved to Canada. In 1972, at the urging of her husband, a professor at the University of Ottawa, she began taking creative writing classes. In 1975 she received an M.A. degree from the University of Ottawa. While working toward her degree, Shields published two volumes of poetry, Others (1972) and Intersect (1974). After graduating she began teaching English and creative writing, holding positions at the University of Ottawa (1976-1977) and at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver (1978-1980). Beginning in 1980 she taught at the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg. Shields also began writing novels.

Shields’s first novel, Small Ceremonies (1976), is about a woman writing about 19th-century Canadian author Susanna Moodie. Over the next 16 years Shields’s books earned positive reviews in the United States and Canada. Happenstance (1980) is about a middle-aged woman who discovers her artistic talent as a quiltmaker. Swann (1989) concerns a rivalry between Canadian academics. The Stone Diaries is a detailed fictional account of the life of a Canadian woman born in 1905. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, this work won the 1993 Governor General's Literary Award in Canada and the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. Larry's Party (1997) chronicles 20 years in the life of a mild-mannered, ordinary man named Larry Weller. The book won the 1998 Orange Prize in the United Kingdom. The novel Unless (2002), about a woman whose college-aged daughter suddenly drops out of society, won the Ethel Wilson prize for fiction in 2003.