Anne Collins, publisher of Knopf Random Canada, has acquired Canadian English rights to Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing, a book of advice and reflections on writing by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, shimmering with her unique style, sense, humour, vision, and wit.

This essential work, drawn by Carol Shields’s daughter and novelist Anne Giardini and her grandson Nicholas Giardini from her voluminous correspondence with other writers, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures, is a last gift from one of our finest novelists meant for both aspiring and established writers. It helps answer some of the most fundamental questions about writing: such as why we write at all, whether writing can be taught, what keeps a reader turning the pages, and how a writer knows when a work is done. It’s the first book of new material from the beloved author of The Stone Diaries and Unless (and eight other novels) since her death in 2003.

The Giardinis are represented by Page Two principals and Transatlantic agents Jesse Finkelstein and Trena White.