When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

One World / Random House

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One World / Random House

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

One World / Random House

Fatimah Asghar is the primary recipient of the Carol Shields prize for fiction for his or her debut novel When We Were Sisters. The award was introduced Thursday night at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn.

They will obtain $150,000 in addition to a writing residency at Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Fatimah Asghar, creator of When We Were Sisters

Cassidy Kristiansen/PR

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Cassidy Kristiansen/PR

Fatimah Asghar, creator of When We Were Sisters

Cassidy Kristiansen/PR

Asghar’s When We Were Sisters is a coming-of-age novel that follows three orphaned Muslim-American siblings left to lift each other within the aftermath of their mother and father’ loss of life. The prize jury wrote that Asghar “weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems,” and their novel is “head-turning in its experimentations.”

When We Were Sisters displays a few of Ashgar’s personal experiences each as a queer South Asian Muslim and an individual whose mother and father died after they have been younger. In October, they told NPR’s Scott Simon that being on the margins of society and weak from such a younger age was a window into “a certain kind of cruelty that I think most people don’t have a reference point for.”

Ashgar mentioned that the tales they examine orphans whereas rising up by no means actually rang true — that they’d at all times suppose “this doesn’t feel accurate.”

Of the ebook, they mentioned: “These characters, they go through things that are so heartbreaking and so cruel yet they still insist on loving as much as they possibly can, even when they are mean to each other. That, to me, is what it means to be alive.”

Asghar is the creator of the poetry assortment If They Come for Us, in addition to a filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the author and co-producer of the Emmy-nominated net sequence, Brown Girls, which highlights friendships between ladies of colour.

The shortlist for the prize included Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades, What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr, and Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin. Each of those authors will obtain $12,500 as finalists for the prize.

Susan Swan, Don Oravec and Janice Zawerbny, who co-founded the award, famous that the 5 shortlisted novels “made up one of the strongest literary prize shortlists we’ve seen in recent years.”

The prize, created to honor fiction by ladies and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States, was named for Pulitzer Prize-winning creator Carol Shields, who died of breast most cancers in 2003. The Carol Shields Foundation supplies scholarships, mentoring applications, and workshops to advertise the manufacturing of literary works.