Which novel by Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995?

Which novel by Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995? The answer is The Stone Diaries.

Published in 1993, The Stone Diaries is a fictional autobiography tracing the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett from her birth in Manitoba through old age. Carol Shields presents Daisy’s story through diaries, letters, photographs, obituaries, family records, and other documentary-style forms, making an invented life feel like an assembled historical archive.

The novel won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Shields was born in the United States but became a Canadian citizen and spent much of her adult life in Canada, a detail that sometimes causes confusion because the Pulitzer’s fiction rules traditionally referred to an American author. The prize recognized the book’s distinguished fiction rather than its author’s nationality alone.

The Stone Diaries is also commonly mixed up with The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker Prize-winning novel, and The Sportswriter, Richard Ford’s novel. Shields’s book is known for its deliberately ordinary protagonist: its literary power comes from showing how a seemingly everyday life can contain ambition, loss, marriage, work, and historical change.