Julia Elliott has won the 2026 Carol Shields Prize, given annually to an outstanding work of fiction by a woman or nonbinary author, for her story collection Hellions.
Elliott’s book, published last year by Tin House, tells the stories of ordinary people who seek connections to the supernatural world. A critic for Kirkus wrote of the collection, “The path forward is not always brightest in these transporting tales.”
Elliott was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Toronto on Tuesday evening. The other finalists for the prize were Quiara Alegría Hudes for The White Hot, Lee Lai for Cannon, Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief, and Sonya Walger for Lion.
The jurors for the prize, Carmen Maria Machado, Ivan Coyote, Cherie Dimaline, Chitra Divakaruni, and Deesha Philyaw, said in a statement, “This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls. Here, human folly moves against a backdrop of horror and magic. There’s folklore in these stories, and Southern gothic horror, and surrealism, and fantasy, and, at their center, a thread of uneasy, bodily realism. The work evokes writers like Angela Carter, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Naylor, and Kelly Link. But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control; Elliott is a gifted and thrilling writer.”
The $150,000 Carol Shields Prize, named for the American Canadian author of novels including The Stone Diaries and Unless, was established in 2023. The previous winners are When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar, Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
