Skip to main content

American author Fatimah Asghar has won the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for their debut novel When We Were Sisters.

The $150,000 award celebrates excellence in fiction by women and non-binary authors in Canada and the U.S., and is bankrolled by BMO.

Asghar, whose pronouns are gender-neutral, also wrote the poetry collection If They Come for Us and is the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series “Brown Girls.”

They also win a residency at the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The jurors said that Asghar’s book is “a tour de force, at once stirring and beautiful, breathtaking in its lyricism, and head-turning in its experimentations.”

The other shortlisted authors, who will each receive $12,500, are Canadian Suzette Mayr for The Sleeping Car Porter, and Americans Daphne Palasi Andreades for Brown Girls, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri for What We Fed to the Manticore and Alexis Schaitkin for Elsewhere.

This content appears as provided to The Globe by the originating wire service. It has not been edited by Globe staff.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe