Carol Ann Shields CC OM FRSC (née Warner; June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer.

She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.

[1] She studied at Hanover College, in Indiana,[1] where she received a BA in English in 1957, and became a member of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority.

A United Nations scholarship encouraged Shields to spend a junior year abroad 1955–1956 at the University of Exeter in England.

In 1955, while on British Council sponsored study week in Scotland, she met a Canadian engineering student, Donald Hugh Shields.

Shields was the author of several short story collections, including Various Miracles (1985), The Orange Fish (1989), and Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000).

Carol Shields wrote plays including Departures and Arrivals which has been performed hundreds of times by both amateur and professional theaters.

[6] Giardini and her son, Nicholas, edited a book of Shields' thoughts and advice on writing, Startle and Illuminate, published in 2016.

[7] Shields' youngest daughter, Sara Cassidy, has published many children's books and young adult novels, including Slick (2010), Windfall (2011), A Boy Named Queen (2016), and Nevers (2019), which was nominated for the Governor General's Award for young people's literature.

In 2020, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction was announced as a new literary award to honor writing by Canadian and American women and non-binary authors.