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The 2026 Carol Shields Prize: Winner and Finalists

🏆 Just Announced

The 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

One of the most valuable literary prizes in the world, the $150,000 Carol Shields Prize celebrates exceptional fiction by women and non-binary writers in the US and Canada. This year's winner and four finalists represent some of the most urgent, imaginative writing being done today.

🏆 Winner

2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

Hellions cover
Short StoriesSouthern Gothic🏆 Winner — $150,000

Hellions

by Julia Elliott

Eleven stories that leap from medieval plague-stricken convents to rural South Carolina to feminist art colonies in the North Carolina mountains, bound together by a thread of folk horror, Southern gothic, surrealism, and "uneasy, bodily realism." Elliott's range is extraordinary — every sentence, as the jury put it, either crackles or crawls. An exuberant, ferocious debut collection from one of the most thrilling new voices in American fiction.

"Every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls. Elliott is a gifted and thrilling writer." — 2026 Jury Citation

Our Favorites From the Shortlist

Four Books That Nearly Won

The White Hot cover
Literary FictionDebut Novel

The White Hot

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

A young mother in an intergenerational Philadelphia household walks away from everything — boarding a one-way bus to the furthest destination — and spends the next ten years finding out why she had to. Told as a letter from mother to daughter, Hudes' debut novel is fierce, funny, spiritual, and unflinching about the inherited rage and generational trauma that make leaving the only way forward.

"How could love look like leaving?" — 2026 Jury Citation

Cannon cover
Graphic NovelQueer Fiction

Cannon

by Lee Lai

We meet Cannon surrounded by the wreckage of a restaurant she has just destroyed. What follows is a sharp, funny, emotionally devastating graphic novel about working-class life in Montreal, a faltering friendship, an aging grandfather, and a nervous breakdown that turns out to be the most honest thing Cannon has ever done. Lee Lai's follow-up to the award-winning Stone Fruit is everything fans hoped for and more.

"Lai's sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash." — 2026 Jury Citation

A Guardian and a Thief cover
Literary FictionDystopian

A Guardian and a Thief

by Megha Majumdar

In a near-future Kolkata ravaged by flooding and climate collapse, a mother preparing to emigrate to America with her family wakes up to find her purse — containing every passport, visa, and document they need — stolen. The thief is a desperate man trying to feed his own family. Majumdar tells both stories with equal compassion, asking what poverty and catastrophe do to the line between protection and crime.

"Harrowing yet captivating, filling us simultaneously with horror and compassion." — 2026 Jury Citation

Lion cover
AutofictionFamily Saga

Lion

by Sonya Walger

A daughter's portrait of her father — polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, skydiver, born in the aftershocks of Argentina's greatest earthquake. Told in a perpetual present tense that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a peripatetic childhood shuttling between England and South America, Lion is autofiction of startling emotional precision from actress and podcaster Sonya Walger, writing her debut novel about the most complicated love of her life.

"A fully unique accomplishment that re-sets the bar for excellence in craft." — 2026 Jury Citation

The Carol Shields Prize exists because extraordinary writing by women and non-binary authors has long gone underrecognized and undercompensated. This year's winner and finalists make a powerful case for why that mission matters.

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