Carol Shields

Shields grew up outside Chicago, married a Canadian engineer, and moved permanently to Canada in her twenties, raising five children while writing steadily in the margins of domestic life before her fiction found a wide readership in middle age.

The Stone Diaries, structured as a fictional woman's autobiography complete with invented family photographs, won both the Pulitzer Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award, an unusual cross-border sweep for a writer who held dual citizenship her whole career.

She served as chancellor of the University of Winnipeg and continued writing through a long illness; breast cancer, diagnosed in her early sixties, eventually killed her in 2003.