Carol Shields
1935-2003

""Writing wasn't a career. It was just what I did."

A prolific author, dramatist, scholar and poet, Carol Warner was born in Oak Park, Illinois on June 2, 1935. She moved to Vancouver in 1957 after marrying a Canadian, Donald Hughes Shields, whom she met while studying at the University of Exeter, England.

While her young family was living in Manchester, England, she published her first short stories. In 1965, while living in Toronto, she won the C.B.C. Young Writer's Competition for poetry. In 1971 she became a Canadian citizen. In 1975 she completed an M.A. in English at the University of Ottawa.

In the years that followed Carol Shields combined an extremely successful career as an award winning writer with numerous university appointments. In 1998 she was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Carol Shields was unequivocal about her Canadian identity; in an interview with Maclean's in 1994 while she was residing temporarily in California she stated, "My Canada includes those landed immigrants and new citizens who live in Canada but were not born here. . . . I immigrated from the United States in 1957 as a young woman of 22 and have been a citizen for most of that time. Canada, for me, is home. I married my way into the country. Yesterday, my husband phoned a doctor in Berkeley to get an appointment and was obliged to listen to an advertisement for the clinic. Canadians would never stand for that. The whole market economy kind of presses on you here. It is such an imposition. On the other hand, the flowers are blooming as we speak.''

Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson identified one of Carol Shields's gifts as being her "extraordinary and loving ability to to take us into the lives of people you meet every day and make us care passionately about them."