[Many thanks to Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture for sharing this news.] NPRAndrew Limbong reports on Canisia Lubrin’s recent victory. She won the Carol Shields Award for Fiction for this year’s debut short collection Code Noir (2024).
Author Canisia Lublin, known for her poetry, won this year’s Carol Shields Award fiction, Honoring women and non-binary storytellers in the US and Canada.

Lublin’s debut fiction work, 2024 Code Noira collection consisting of 59 short stories. He jumped off the “Black Code” of Louis XIV and established rules of slavery in French and French colonies.
“Canicia Lublin’s prose is polyphonic,” the award judge wrote in a statement announcing Lublin’s victory. “The story invites you to immerse yourself in the intimate cleaning moments of history, both real and speculative. The riff at Napoleon’s order revives the legacy of slavery, colonialism and violence.”
The Carol Shields Award in Fiction is relatively new. Named after a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, the aim is to increase the literary visibility of books written by women and non-binary writers. [. . .]
Canisia Lublin: Writer, critic, editor and teacher Kanisia Lublin grew up in St. Lucia. She studied at York University and won an MFA at Guelph University. Lublin is the author of a collection of poetry dyzgraphxst (2020) and Voodoo hypothesis (2017) was selected as the CBC Best Poetry Book and was finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Her work has been translated into Italian and Spanish.
Lublin is Queen’s University’s 2019 Writer-in-Residence and teaches at Humber College’s Faculty of English. She has worked as an arts manager and community advocate for nearly 20 years. She lives in Whitby, Ontario.
For the complete article, please refer to https://www.npr.org/2025/05/01/NX-S1-5377339/CANISIA-LUBRIN-CODE-NOIR-CAROL-SHIELDS-BOOK-PRIZE
Also please refer https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/canisia-lubrin
[Photo of Canisia Lubrin by Rachel Eliza Griffiths/Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.]