October 14th, 2024

Fatimah Ashgar wins $150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

By The Associated Press on May 4, 2023.

NEW YORK (AP) – A debut novel by the poet and screenwriter Fatimah Ashgar has won the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, a $150,000 honor named for the late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and given for outstanding work by a woman or non-binary person in the U.S. or Canada.

Ashgar’s “When We Were Sisters,” the story of three Muslim-American siblings, was praised Thursday by judges for weaving “narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems, their fragility a mere guise for their complete, unflinching indestructibility.”

Ashgar is known for the poetry collection “If They Come for Us” and as the co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series “Brown Girls.”

Shields, who died in 2003 at age 68, was an American-born author who spent much of her life in Canada. She won the Pulitzer in 1994 for her novel “The Stone Diaries.” The Shields prize is overseen by the Carol Shields Prize Foundation, which provides grants and other forms of assistance to women and non-binary writers.

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