In a record breaking "hat trick," Carol Shields was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel,The Stone Diaries, the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. Carleton University Press is pleased to release a newly designed edition of her poetry book, Coming to Canada, first published by CUP in 1992. This collection of nearly 60 poems includes the key "Coming to Canada" sequence, and is supplemented with selections from two previous volumes, Others (1972) and Intersect (1974). Among the finest writers in the world, Carol Shields has won a large and loyal audience as a witty, compassionate and insightful novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet. She is the author of 15 books. Arriving in Canada from the United States in 1957, Shields is a long-time resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she is Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg.

Carol Shields was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935 and moved to Canada, at the age of 22, after studying at the University of Exeter in England and the University of Ottawa. She was the author of over 20 books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction, novels, a work of criticism on Susanna Moodie, and a biography of Jane Austen. Her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the American Book Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. It was also a runner up for the Booker Prize, bringing her an international following. Larry's Party (also available from BTC Audiobooks) won England's Orange Prize, given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. Carol Shields died in July 2003 in Victoria after a long struggle with cancer.

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