From The Independent
Are there literary prizes for men only? So why, in this day and age, this discrimination? Can we also have prizes for hairy men with beards, then? Or humans under five-six, barring tall people like Margaret Atwood. (They are too good anyway.) Or ... never mind.
Anyway Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss is in the list. (Boy does she need a leg up; afterall she has only won the - totally sexist - 'Man' Booker so far.
Then there is a book on the shortlist supposedly written in 'bad' English by a Chinese author, Xiaolu Guo, 33, titled A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, described as a romantic comedy. I have not having read the book yet, but I live in dread if seeing a flood of half baked manuscripts written in bad Manglish, Singlish and Honglish.
This year's list features writers from India, Britain, Nigeria, China and the United States.
The winner will be announced on 6 June 2007.
THE SHORTLIST
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Rachel Cusk - Arlington Park
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Jane Harris - The Observations
Anne Tyler - Diggings to America
Full story: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/news/article2458816.ece#2007-04-18T00:00:00-00:00
as the organisers of the orange point out, men are totally free to create their own "banana prize". none yet has bothered! (silverfish could initiate it, perhaps?)
ReplyDeletesurveys have shown that men tend to read books by men and sideline books by women, while women read both men and women.
when women play on an even field the prize will be redundant and let's hope that that day does come. meanwhile does this "sexist" prize injure anyone??? (except put a little dent in male egos?)
Strange that you should say that. Does it not diminish women's writing in some way? To me it is like the Paralympics for handicapped people who cannot compete in the Olympics. Are women really that handicapped? If you are good enough you will be read whether you are a man or a woman. I don't hear Margaret Atwood complaining.
ReplyDeleteI am curious about that survey that shows reading the reading habits of men and women. If you are talking about people who read muscular airport paperback thrillers or romances you might have a point. But as far as readers of literary fiction are concerned I think the sex of the writer is quite irrelevant - as far as I am concerned at any rate.
women are certainly not handicapped as you will see if you pick up any of the books on the orange longlist or shortlist: there's some excellent stuff there
ReplyDeletehere's an extract from an article i wrote which was published in "chrome" last year, and which spells out the problem:
Earlier this year, academics Annie Watkins and Lisa Jardine of Queen Mary College, London, carried out a piece of research to mark the tenth anniversary of the Orange Prize for fiction. They surveyed 100 academics, critics and writers – the people they felt were most likely to be well-read and have the most influential opinions about literature to find out their attitudes to the gender of authors.
They found that while women read writers of both sexes quite happily, most men did not. Four out of five men had most recently finished a book by a male, and most had trouble remembering the last novel by a female writer they had read.
Wanting to see if this held true in the Malaysian context, I carried out a small scale survey on my blog and found much the same results. Asked to say what they were currently reading, over 80% of the men said that they were engrossed in a book by a male author. However, unlike the sample interviewed in Britain, most said that they did read women writers and were able to recall the last book they’d read by one.
For most men, Watkins and Jardine concluded, great writing is male writing and they find it more difficult to like or admire a novel authored by a woman. This held true for one or two of my blog readers. “I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with penis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”. Another blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.
More worrying is that these prejudices also appear to extend to those who make recommendations about the best books to read and influence buying habits. Of 56 books suggested by male celebrities in the Observer’s summer reading list in 2003, only 6 were by women. A tally of Time magazine’s 100 All-time Novels chosen by critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo and published earlier this year listed only 10 novels by women writers.
what was the last book you read by a woman? how many books in the past six months? honestly.
what proportion of male authors vs. female authors do you feature in your newsletter?
how many books by female writers do you recommend your customers who walk in asking your advice about good reads?
just take a check ...
most of the male readers i've pointed this bias out to have grinned quite sheepishly and admitted that there is something in this argument
if the positive discrimination of the orange prize makes us stop and think about our own prejudices, the award is worth it