When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar
A World / Random House
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A World / Random House
When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar
A World / Random House
Fatimah Asghar is the first recipient of the Carol Shields Award for Fiction for their debut novel When We Were Sisters. The awards were announced Thursday night at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn.
They will receive $150,000 as well as written residency at the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Fatimah Asghar, author of When We Were Sisters
Cassidy Kristiansen/PR
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Cassidy Kristiansen/PR
Fatimah Asghar, author of When We Were Sisters
Cassidy Kristiansen/PR
Asghar When We Were Sisters is a coming-of-age novel about three orphan Muslim-American siblings who are left to raise each other after the death of their parents. The award jury wrote that Asghar “constructs narrative themes as precise and frugal as lucid poems,” and that their novels are “astonishing experiments.”
When We Were Sisters reflects some of Ashgar’s own experiences as a peculiar South Asian Muslim and someone whose parents died when they were children. In October, we tell NPR Scott Simon that living on the margins of society and being vulnerable from such a young age is a window into “a certain kind of cruelty that I think most people have no reference point to.”
Ashgar says that the stories they read about orphans growing up were never really true — that they always thought “this feels inaccurate.”
About the book, they said: “These characters, they go through such heartbreaking and cruel things, yet they stubbornly love as much as they can, even when they have malice towards each other. To me , that’s what it means to be alive.”
Asghar is the author of a collection of poems If They Come For Us, is also a filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are writers and co-producers of the Emmy-nominated web series, brown girl, highlight the friendship between women of color.
The shortlist for the award includes brown girl by Daphne Palasi Andreades, What we put in Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, The car porter is sleeping by Suzette Mayr, and other places by Alexis Schaitkin. Each of these authors will receive $12,500 as a finalist for the prize.
Susan Swan, Don Oravec and Janice Zawerbny, co-founders of the award, note that the five shortlisted novels “constitute one of the strongest literary award shortlists we’ve ever seen.” In recent years.”
The award, created to honor women’s fiction and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States, is named after Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, who died of breast cancer in 2003. The Carol Shields Foundation offers scholarships, mentoring programs, and seminars to promote the production of literary works.
