Prize-winning Canadian author dies

Novelist Carol Shields, who wrote about love, family and finding one’s place in modern times, has died after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 68.

Shields died in Victoria, British Columbia, of complications from breast cancer that was first diagnosed almost five years ago.

American born Shields was a naturalised Canadian with dual citizenship, referring to herself as having “a foot on either side of the border.”

She continued writing despite her illness, and was a finalist for the prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, last year for Unless.

Author of more than a dozen books, she was best known for The Stone Diaries, winner in 1995 of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle award and Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award.

The Stone Diaries follows the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, “a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck.”

Shields is survived by her husband Don, and five children.