Novelist Carol Shields dies

The Canadian novelist Carol Shields has died aged 68, her publishers announced today.

Shields was a prolific writer, producing 10 novels, three collections of short stories, as well as poetry, plays and critical studies. She won numerous awards, including the Orange prize for Larry's Party and the Pulitzer for The Stone Diaries, and was twice shortlisted for the Booker.

She also wrote a short biography of Jane Austen, whose novels had much in common with her own.

Her fiction was marked by its fidelity to real life, an approach which led some to describe her writing as "domestic". But Shields's novels were never straightforward - The Stone Diaries was a fictional autobiography of a gardening columnist. Last year's Unless, which was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes, concerned a comic novelist struggling with the male establishment's attitude to women writers and her own daughter's seemingly inextricable withdrawal from society. "If the novel is to survive," she once said, "it has to be subverted."

Shields had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer and had grown increasingly frail in recent months. Her eldest daughter said; "She had many books left to write. We are bereft." She was working on an unfinished novel when she died.