More international prize news, this time the Orange Prize for Fiction, which has one important clause in its eligibility criteria: you have to be a woman to win it.
The short list for this year’s prize, worth 30,000 quid, is:
Emma Donoghue (Ireland) for Room
Aminatha Forna (UK-Sierra Leone) for The Memory of Love
Emma Henderson (UK for her debut novel Grace Williams Says It All
Nicole Krauss (US) for Great House
Tea Obreht (Serbia-US) for the book everyone is talking about, The Tiger’s Wife, her first novel. Kathleen Winter (Canada) for her first novel Annabel
Obreht will be one of the headline acts at the Sydney Writers Festival, where (shameless plug) she will be doing an in-conversation with yours truly on Thursday May 19. (She will alo be at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival).
Forna will also be at the festival, and on May 17 she’ll be talking about her book with my friend and colleague Geordie Williamson, in the beautiful blue mountains.
You can read more about the short list here.
Room and The Memory of Love are in the running for this year’s Commonwealth Writers Prize, for which I am one of the judges and without giving anything away I can say that each is among the best books I’ve read in the past 12 months.
Some people, however, argue that a literary prize exclusively for women is an anachronism. The Orange Prize was set up at least partly in response to the perception that women are underrepresented in the Booker Prize.
Others say the Orange Prize is simply sexist, and you can read one such view here.
Well, we don’t have a literary prize exclusively for men, do we? Well, almost: Australia’s most prestigious one, the Miles Franklin Award, established by the will of one of our great female writers, has been dominated by men since Patrick White won the inaugural prize in 1957.
Between 1990 and 2010, for example, women won the Miles Franklin just four times, and one of those was shared (2000, Thea Astley and Mr Kim Scott were joint winners) and one of those was Helen Demidenko.
Interestingly, between 1957 and 1977, a period when perhaps women’s voices struggled to be heard more so than is the case today, women took out the Miles Franklin six times, though three of them were the remarkable Astley.
Indeed, take Astley out of the equation and it looks like this:
Number of Miles Franklin recipients since 1957: 53.
Number of times the winning work has been by a woman: 13.
Number of times that woman was Thea Astley: 4
Number of times that woman was Jessica Anderson: 2
So, since 1957, 9 individual female writers have won the Miles Franklin.
There have been multiple winners among the male recipients, too, but even so the number of individual male writers to win the Miles Franklin since 1957 is: 27, so a 3:1 ratio there.
(I write all of the above with my heart in my mouth, as maths is not my strongest suit).
To finish, my own take on The Orange Prize is this: I don’t think it does any harm. There are lots of literary awards that are open to men and women, so having one that is restricted to women is just another piece of the prize culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment