Carol Shields - Career

Career

Shields was the author of several novels and short story collections, including The Orange Fish (1989), Swann (1987), Various Miracles (1985), Happenstance (1980), and The Republic of Love (1992). She was the recipient of a Canada Council Major Award, two National Magazine Awards, the 1990 Marian Engel Award, the Canadian Author's Award, and a CBC short story award. She was appointed as an officer of the Order of Canada in 1998 and was elevated to companion of the Order in 2002. Shields was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Manitoba.

The Stone Diaries (1993) won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1993 Governor General's Award, the only book to have ever received both awards. It won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994, and was nominated in 1993 for the Booker Prize. The Stone Diaries was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. It was also chosen as a "Notable Book" by The New York Times Book Review, which wrote "The Stone Diaries reminds us again why literature matters."

Carol Shields won the 1998 Orange Prize for Fiction for her 1997 novel Larry's Party. Her last novel, Unless (2002), was nominated for the 2002 Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Booker Prize and the 2003 Orange Prize for Fiction. It was awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Shields was also intensely interested in Jane Austen. She wrote the biography entitled Jane Austen, which won the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction in April 2002, an award accepted by her daughter Meg on her behalf in Toronto, Ontario, on April 22, 2002.

Her last novel, Unless, contains a passionate defense of female writers who write of 'domestic' subjects.

Following her death, six of her short stories were adapted by Shaftesbury Films into the dramatic anthology series The Shields Stories.