Genre-Leaping and Unashamed: Julia Elliott's Hellions Wins the Carol Shields Prize
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction hands out $150,000 to women and non-binary writers in North America. For context: the Booker, one of the most storied prizes in English literature, offers £50,000 and a certificate. The Carol Shields Prize offers three times that. It is, by any reasonable measure, the most financially generous literary prize on the continent — and yet it remains oddly under-discussed outside certain circles. That says something, though I'm not sure it flatters anyone.
This year's winner is Julia Elliott, for her short story collection Hellions, published by Tin House Books. The five-person jury — Carmen Maria Machado, Ivan Coyote, Cherie Dimaline, Chitra Divakaruni, and Deesha Philyaw, a lineup that could headline a literary festival — described the work as an "eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection" that "takes no half-measures." Every sentence, they wrote, "crackles or crawls." One imagines there are worse things to have said about one's prose.
The jury placed Elliott in company with Angela Carter, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Naylor, and Kelly Link. That is a serious constellation. Carter made the gothic feminist; Allison made the confessional ferocious; Naylor made community a form of witness; Link makes the uncanny feel like the only honest response to contemporary life. If Elliott is genuinely in that tradition, then Hellions is not a book to be filed away under "promising." It is the thing itself.
The short story collection has had a peculiar status in English-language publishing. Beloved by critics, distrusted by sales departments, it tends to thrive when it refuses to behave like a novel — when each piece insists on its own world rather than contributing to a larger arc. Shakespeare's Memory by Borges remains the gold standard of what a collection can do with pure strangeness — stories so compressed they feel like they might explode. Bolaño's Telephone Calls took a different route: laconic, oblique, building atmosphere out of almost nothing.
Elliott, by all accounts, does neither. She goes large. Folklore, gothic horror, surrealism, fantasy — Hellions apparently moves across registers the way a jazz musician moves across keys: with "tremendous control," the jury says. Control is the word that matters. Genre-leaping is easy. Landing each leap is the hard part.
The ceremony was held in Toronto on June 2nd. Elliott also receives a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland — remote, architecturally startling, the kind of place writers are sent to contemplate whether they've earned it. She has, apparently. The $150,000 says so too.
