Newsnight Review discussed The Canadian novelist Carol Shields - who won the Pulitzer and Orange prizes and was short listed for the Booker - who died on Wednesday night at the age of 68.
(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)
MARK LAWSON:
Carol Shields died at the age of 68. Julie, it's amazing to think she was only published in Britain for the first time 12 years ago. In that time, two booker short listings, won the Orange Prize, shortlisted to others. Why did readers react so well?
JULIE MYERSON:
She does a fantastic thing, which the best novels do. She takes tiny, ordinary things and makes them large. Or she expresses the huge through the tiny and ordinary, and OK, domestic. She does that brilliantly, really.
MARK LAWSON:
Personally, I think I have read all of them and liked a great deal the way she did develop as a writer. She starts with the domestic, then starts addressing different voices. It did strike me as interesting that she was born in Chicago and then moved because of marriage to Canada. It always interested me that I think the book has ended up more Canadian than American?
JULIE MYERSON:
I know what you mean. She does feel Canadian to me, too. There is a gentle reticence but tenacity. The books got angrier, too, which I loved about them. What she really wanted to do was show that the domestic could be a large canvas with important things happening on it. She said every person in the world has a domestic life but you wouldn't know that from reading Hemingway, which says it all.
One-Minute World News 
News services
E-mail this to a friend 
Printable version 
Watch the whole programme 
