Canisia Lubrin, professor and coordinator of the University of Guelph’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, is the 2025 winner of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Lubrin won for, Code Noir, and is the first Canadian to take home the prize.
The Code Noir, or the Black Code, is a set of 59 articles decreed by King Louis XVI in 1685 that regulated the ownership and defined the conditions for slaves in all French colonies. Lubrin’s work imagines the articles, blending literary and political force in an examination of enslavement and colonization and the power of Black resistance. Accompanying the text are black-and-white drawings by visual artist Torkwase Dyson.
“With 59 articles, King Louis XVI’s 1685 Code Noir enshrined one of the most tragic visions of the world into law. But it is a great luck that the human imagination, with all its faults and its will, does exceed hold, shackle, and the mismanagement of our sovereignty alike. That victor and victimized, by this same measure, are linked in the struggle for fuller life, a fuller world. Black history, then, is a crucible of what is possible beyond authorized slaughter and imperial disorder,” Lubrin says.
“I’m grateful to the jury and The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, with its commitment to expanding the reach of literature written by women and non-binary authors. It is a thrill to be part of the breadth and scope of the work recognized on the 2025 long and short list of brilliant authors. Named for the trailblazing Carol Shields, this prize is a great honour for Code Noir.”
The jury praised Code Noir saying, the book breaks new ground in fiction.
“Its characters inhabit multi-layered landscapes of the past, present and future, confronting suffering, communion, and metamorphosis,” the jury said. “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.”
Code Noir has been shortlisted by the Writers Union of Canada Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of short fiction by a Canadian writer and is a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. It was a finalist for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Both CBC Books and The Globe and Mail named it among the best books of 2024.
Lubrin is an award-winning writer whose previous books, Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst have been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize and the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, among others.
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, named for one of Canada’s best-known writers, is the first major English-language literary prize for novels, short story collections and graphic novels written by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States. The winner takes home a U.S. $150,000 prize and receives a five-night residency at the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland.