Author of the Month for January - Carol Shields

We start 2012 with American-born Canadian author Carol Shields. Born in Oak Park Illinois, it was during a college exchange visit to Scotland that Shields met her husband-to-be, Canadian engineering student, Donald Hugh Shields. The couple married in 1957 and moved to Canada, where they had a son and four daughters - Shields later became a Canadian citizen.

Finding time to continue her writing in the midst of raising her family, Shields once described herself as ''the mother who typed.'', she often wrote about the lives of women and their experience of the domestic, everyday realities which make up a life.

She is perhaps best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada. There is an Orkney connection within the novel as one of the characters returns to his birthplace in Orkney from Canada after his wife leaves him.

Sadly Carol Shields died in 2003, she had written 10 novels, 3 collections of stories and 3 volumes of poetry. Her daughter Anne Giardini is also a writer. Giardini has contributed to the National Post as a columnist, and has published two novels, The Sad Truth About Happiness and  Advice for Italian Boys.

We also have The Sad Truth About Happiness in stock if you want to see if/how Giardini's writing has been influenced by her mother's literary legacy.