The short list for the fourth annual Carol Shields Prize for Fiction has landed, with five writers in contention for the US$150,000 (around $204,700) award given to an English- language woman or non-binary author in Canada or the U.S.

Montreal’s Lee Lai is the only Canadian on this year’s short list, who nabbed a spot for the graphic novel Cannon. Other finalists for this year’s prize are Hellions by Julia Elliott, The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes, A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar and Lion by Sonya Walger.

Previous winners of the prize are Fatimah Asghar for When We Were Sisters (2023), V.V. Ganeshananthan for Brotherless Night (2024) and Canisia Lubrin for Code Noir (2025). This year’s jurors were Ivan Coyote, Cherie Dimaline, Chitra Divakaruni, Carmen Maria Machado and Deesha Philyaw.

The winner will be announced at an event in Toronto on June 2. For more about the prize see carolshieldsprizeforfiction.com.

The poems in Saulteaux, Cree and Métis poet Brandi Bird’s second collection, Pitiful (Anansi, 112 pages, $23), are anything but. Powerful and vivid, filled with rage and desire, they chronicle and respond to the speaker’s eating disorder, psychiatric hospitalization and survival. Among the many violences the collection confronts is the prevailing whiteness in the cultural image of eating disorders and how that erases others who suffer.

In Post-Memory, a longer poem set in a psychiatric ward, the speaker reckons with the way eating disorder treatment robs patients of agency: “I am not a citizen here. I am/ not allowed to leave. The nurses/ won’t let me forget it.” These short sentences, and the mid-sentence line breaks, evoke a sense of reluctance and coercion.

The coercive nature of treatment isn’t the only source of disorientation. Equally disorienting is the estheticized, child-like white stereotype, which makes eating disorders culturally palatable, against which the speaker is measured. When another patient asks for advice on vomiting, the speaker refuses. “Really I don’t/ want competition from a white girl./ Her sadness/ is always prettier/ than mine.” This alienation and disorientation are countered, for the speaker, in poetry, fragments of which cover her walls. “I recognize myself in poetry./ The idea that I belong here/ The surprise that I am alive,/ a breath.”

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The international literary scene has been showering Canadian authors and publishers with love as of late.

Tundra Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada, was named best publisher for the North America region at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair earlier this month.

The book fair, in conjunction with the Swedish government, also announced Winnipeg-born, L.A.-based author-illustrator Jon Klassen (This Is Not My Hat) as the recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for his work in children’s literature, a prize that comes with five million Swedish kronor (around $749,000).

Closer to home, two Canadian authors are among 223 recipients of 2026 Guggenheim fellowships based out of New York.

Sea turtles are an integral part of the ocean and shoreline ecosystem. Taking Turns with Turtles — A Rescue Story by Shari Becker (Groundwood, 36 pages, hardcover, $22) is an interesting, educational science picture book for children ages 3-6 about turtles that become cold-stunned when chilly fall weather hits too quickly along the east coast of the U.S.

Becker reminds us of the contributions turtles make to the ecosystem — they eat jellyfish, which protects fish populations, and their eggshells and waste fertilize beach plants, which prevents sand erosion. She also writes about the important role that dedicated volunteers play, nursing stranded turtles as they recover from their trauma and later returning them to the sea.

Brittany Lane’s pretty pastel watercolours show both detail and imagined underwater scenes.

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