Julia Elliott has won the $150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her collection Hellions.

Today, at a ceremony in Toronto, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which awards $150,000 annually to women and non-binary writers with books published in Canada and the US, announced its 2026 winner: Julia Elliott’s short story collection Hellions (Tin House Books).

This year’s jury was comprised of Carmen Maria Machado (Chair), Ivan Coyote, Cherie Dimaline, Chitra Divakaruni, and Deesha Philyaw. Here’s what they had to say bout the winning book:

This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls. Here, human folly moves against a backdrop of horror and magic. There’s folklore in these stories, and Southern gothic horror, and surrealism, and fantasy, and, at their center, a thread of uneasy, bodily realism. The work evokes writers like Angela Carter, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Naylor, and Kelly Link. But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control; Elliott is a gifted and thrilling writer.

Elliott will be awarded $150,000 and a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn. The other four finalists will each receive $12,500.