Best-selling and award-winning writer Sharon Bala is the 2025 Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence (online) from February 24 to March 21, 2025.
In addition to offering free writing consulations to the community, Bala’s residency also includes an Inaugural Reading Wednesday, February 26, a Master Writing Class, Wednesday March 5, and the Carol Shields Memorial Lecture, Wednesday, March 19.
Emerging writers, students, and community members are encouraged to reach out to Sharon at sh.bala@uwinnipeg.ca for a free consultation about their writing during her residency.
Bala‘s bestselling debut novel, The Boat People, which is in translation in four languages, won the 2020 Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. She was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018, the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the 2019 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and the 2019 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was shortlisted for several other literary awards.
She won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize in 2017. Her short fiction has been published in: Best Canadian Stories 2024, The Journey Prize 29, Hazlitt, Grain, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, and Maisonneuve.
Her second novel will be published by McClelland & Stewart in January 2026.
UWinnipeg’s Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence program honours the memory of Carol Shields, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Chancellor of The University of Winnipeg from 1996 to 2000. Shields was known as a generous mentor to emerging writers, and this reidency reflects her spirit.
Past writers in this program include Margaret Sweatman, Sandra Birdsell, Maria Campbell, David Bergen, Ivan Coyote, Debbie Paterson, Gregory Scofield, Chandra Mayor, Jennifer Still, GMB Chomichuk, Katherena Vermette, Méira Cook, francesca ekwuyasi, and Garry Thomas Morse.
