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Carol Shields, novelist, poet, playwright, biographer (b at Oak Park, Illinois 2 Jun 1935; d at Victoria, BC 16 July 2003). Shields was educated at Hanover College, Indiana, the University of Exeter in England, and the University of Ottawa. She moved to Canada in her early twenties when she married Donald Shields, with whom she later had five children. The award-winning Small Ceremonies (1976) was her first novel; its narrator, biographer Judith Gill (who, as Shields did for her master's degree, writes on Susanna MOODIE), discovers how fiction and biography are more complementary than distinct forms. The intersections among fiction, biography and autobiography intrigued Shields throughout her career.
After moving to Winnipeg in 1980, Shields taught at the University of Manitoba and served as Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg (1996-2000). Shields wrote the critical work Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision (1975); several books of poetry, Others (1972), Intersect (1974) and Coming to Canada (1992); and a number of plays, including Departures and Arrivals (1990), Thirteen Hands (1993), and, with her daughter Catherine, Fashion Power Guilt and the Charity of Families (1995). Shields edited, with Marjorie Anderson, two Dropped Threads volumes (2001, 2003), best-selling anthologies in which women from a variety of walks of life discuss intimate, defining moments in their personal histories, articulating stories and emotions that are not as a rule publicly shared. Shields' writerly biography, Jane Austen (2001), which won the Charles Taylor prize for literary non-fiction, profiles a British author with whom Shields shared a sensitivity to the intricacies of domestic life and a wittily understated satirical voice. Shields remains best known as a fiction writer; her work includes the short-story collections Various Miracles (1985), The Orange Fish (1989), Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000), and 2004's posthumous The Collected Stories (which includes a chapter from her last, unfinished novel Segue); and the novels The Box Garden (1977), Happenstance (1980), Swann: A Mystery (1987), The Republic of Love (1992), A Celibate Season (1998, written with Blanche Howard), and the celebrated THE STONE DIARIES (1993), which won several prizes, among them the Governor General's Award, the National Critics' Circle Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Stone Diaries reflects richly on the significances, successes and failures of Daisy Goodwill's various attempts to render the story of her life. In 1997, Shields published the highly acclaimed novel Larry's Party, an exploration of the sensibility of an ordinary man in the last years of the millennium that traces the circuitous life path of Larry, a florist-turned-maze-designer. Larry's Party won the Orange Prize, was short-listed for the GILLER PRIZE, and was in 2001 adapted by Richard Ouzounian and composer Marek Norman as a musical play. In her final completed novel, Unless (2002), Shields ventures into heroine Reta Winters's life as a writer, and observes Reta's sense of grief and bewilderment at her daughter's apparently inexplicable decision to drop out of her middle-class life in order to panhandle on a Toronto street corner, bearing a cardboard sign that says, simply, "goodness."Unless was nominated for the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. In 2002, Shields was elevated from Officer to Companion of the ORDER OF CANADA in a ceremony in which the Honorable Iona CAMPAGNOLO paid tribute to Shields's compassionate ability to "create intimate worlds of great beauty and depth from seemingly ordinary events and ordinary people." Shields spent the final three years of her life in Victoria, where she died at the age of 68, from complications due to breast cancer.
Author
MANINA JONES
Links to Other Sites
Carol Shields: Why Literature Matters
This multimedia CBC website profiles the life and work of Carol Shields. Includes video clip of interview with the author.
Carol Shields
A profile of the acclaimed author Carol Shields and a bibliography of her works. A Manitoba Writers' Guild website.
The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields discusses “The Stone Diaries” at this Penguin Books website.
Carol Shields
A profile of Carol Shields, Canadian novelist, poet, and playwright. From Library and Archives Canada.
Canadian Writers
An online exhibition of documents about some of Canada's most celebrated writers. From the Literary Manuscripts Collection of Library and Archives Canada.
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