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Born and brought up in Chicago (in the same suburb as Ernest Hemingway), Carol lived in Canada since 1957.
She died of cancer in July 2003. at the age of 68.
She is survived by her husband, Don, and their children John, Anne, Catherine, Meg and Sara.
The Stone Diaries was nominated for The Man Booker Prize Best Novel and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Best Novel. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction for Larry's Party. Unless was nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction Best Novel.
Bibliography
Novels
Small Ceremonies (1976)
The Box Garden (1977)
Happenstance (1980)
A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982)
Mary Swann (1987) aka Swann
The Orange Fish (1989)
A Celibate Season (1991, with Blanche Howard)
The Republic of Love (1992)
The Stone Diaries (1993)
Larry's Party (1997)
Unless (2002)
Duet (2003)
Collections
Others (1972, poems)
Intersect (1974, poems)
Various Miracles (1985)
Coming to Canada (1992, poems)
Dressing up for the Carnival (2000)
Thirteen Hands and Other Plays (2002)
The Collected Stories (2004)
Plays
Departures & Arrivals (1988)
Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families (1993, with Catherine Shields)
Thirteen Hands (1997)
Anniversary (1998, with Dave Williamson)
Non Fiction
Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision (1977)
Jane Austen (2001)
A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard (2007)
The Staircase Letters (2007, with Elma Gerwin, Arthur Motyer)
Bibliography courtesy of Fantastic Fiction
Carol Shields's website
This bio was last updated on 10/21/2016. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
Can you tell us how you became a writer?
I was a word-conscious child. My terrible early efforts -- by terrible, I
mean derivative and unreflective -- were encouraged by my teachers and parents.
I loved narrative; I knew that very early. And the act of writing was for me
probably the most spiritual experience in my life. It seemed only natural to
write the kind of books that I wanted to read.
What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about
the writing of this novel that begs to be told?
I wanted to write a novel after writing a biography and I found the voice
of the novel in a short story I had previously published, "A Scarf,"
in Dressing Up for the Carnival. I wanted to write in the first person
after many years of writing in the third person. A friend, Winnipeg writer Jake
MacDonald, convinced me during one of our many long lunches that we novelists
would be able to show more "decent" people in fiction if we wrote in
the first person. His theory is that the third-person voice makes us nasty and
ironic and less in tune with the world. I think he's right. I chose the voice of
44 year-old Reta Winters, a wife and mother, a writer and translator, who has
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