Report from the Field: Gender Inequality Within Literary Prize Culture / Sharifa Petersen

Prizes aren’t everything. But for literary writers in a world growing less literary, they just might be. Ivor Indyk states that literary prizes function ‘as the last bastion in this world for the literary recognition that is withheld by the marketplace.’ Which is why it is all the more pertinent that we begin to address the issue of gender within these awards. 

Although women read more than men and books by female authors are published in roughly the same numbers, they are vastly overlooked for prizes in comparison to male authors. A recent proliferation of data on women in the literary arts has provided remarkable insight into current trends. In a 2015 study, novelist Nicola Griffith (Hild, Ammonite) looked at 15 years worth of data from a few top literary prizes. She found that fiction written by women about women won hardly any prizes, and fiction by women about men fared a little better. Books by men about men were miles ahead. ... [mehr] http://www.vidaweb.org/women-and-prizes-gender-inequality-within-literary-prize-culture/