Canisia Lubrin (Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Canisa Lubrin has won the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for Code Noir.

The $150,000 (U.S.) prize, now in its third year, acknowledges, celebrates, and promotes the best works of fiction written by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States. Lubrin is the first Canadian writer to win the award.

Lubrin was one of five writers shortlisted for this year’s prize. Canadian writer Dominique Fortier was also shortlisted, alongside translator Rhonda Mullins, for her novel Pale Shadows. The other shortlisted authors were Miranda July for All Fours, Sarah Manguso for Liars, and Aube Rey Lescure for River East, River West.

In addition to the prize money, Lubrin also receives a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn. Each of the four finalists receives $12,500 (U.S.).

Code Noir is the debut work of fiction for Lubrin, a Griffin Prize-winning poet and the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Using as its basis the 59 articles set out in the 17th-century “Code Noir,” which defined the conditions of slavery in the French empire, the work is composed of 59 linked stories – written in varying styles – about characters determined to move free from the past.

In their citation, the jury (comprised of chair Diana Abu-Jaber, Norma Dunning, Kim Fu, Tessa McWatt, and Jeanne Thornton) called Code Noir “a virtuoso collection that breaks new ground in short fiction.”

“Code Noir contains multitudes,” they wrote. “Its characters inhabit multi-layered landscapes of the past, present and future, confronting suffering, communion, and metamorphosis. Canisia Lubrin’s prose is polyphonic; the stories invite you to immerse yourself in both the real and the speculative, in the intimate and in sweeping moments of history. Riffing on the Napoleonic decree, Lubrin retunes the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and violence.”

Code Noir was published in February 2024 by Knopf Canada. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

The Carol Shields Prize ceremony took place at the Chicago History Museum on May 1. The prize has been alternating its awards ceremony location from year to year between the U.S. and Canada. The first prize, in 2023, was awarded in the U.S., and last year’s winner was announced at an event in Toronto.

Established in early 2020 to honour the literary excellence of North American women and non-binary writers, the prize was named for Carol Shields, the late American-born and Canadian-based award-winning author.

Not all of the Canadian authors on the shortlist and in the jury were in attendance at this year’s event, with more than one telling Q&Q they had made the difficult decision to pass on the ceremony over concerns about crossing the U.S.-Canada border.