Poetic Obituaries: Family was very important to [Carol] Shields's work

as well as to her life: her last novel concerned a mother's struggles to come to terms with a beloved daughter becoming a dropout.

Although embraced as a Canadian literary star, she was born in Chicago, and said the only thing wrong with her childhood was that there was not enough of it: "It was all very good, but it wasn't enough."

She wrote poetry, literary criticism and biography, but found her medium when her first novel, Small Ceremonies, was published in 1976

from The Guardian: Orange winner dies, still engrossed in her books, at 68

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