Women buy two-thirds of the books sold in Britain... so why is the literary world such a male chauvinist bastion?

By JOANNA TROLLOPE
Daily Mail -  27 May 2012

Equality battle: Best-selling author Joanna Trollope makes a case for keeping a female-only book prize after Orange pulls out of its support for the gong

Here’s a question for you all. Do you think men write better novels than women? Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul said that when he reads a piece written by a woman, he can tell it is inferior to his own writing. Events this week have shone the spotlight on this question all over again.
A few days ago, a peach of a sponsorship came back on the market.
Orange, which has been terrific sponsors of the top women’s prize for fiction in the UK for 17 years, is giving up its support to concentrate on film, and I foresee a competitive rush to replace the company.
Why? Because this is a valuable prize for sponsors – worth in excess of £17 million in promotional value last year alone – and it is a prize that readers love, the book trade loves, and which has produced more classy, readable and thought-provoking winners than any other literary prize in this country (only one Man Booker prize victor, Yann Martel’s The Life Of Pi, has outsold Orange’s top three winners).
What about Rose Tremain, Marilynne Robinson, Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to name but five recipients?
The £30,000 Orange Prize is awarded to the best, most original, most accessible novel by a woman anywhere in the world, as long as it is published in English in the UK, in the given year. It was founded by women, is produced, promoted and administered by women, and is judged by them too.

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