Good and Bad Literary News

Let’s start with the good news.

Women dominate the long list for the Canadian award the Scotiabank Giller Prize.  (The prize is named for former reporter Doris Giller.) On the list of 12, women make up 10 of the nominees.

The list includes:

Margaret Atwood – The Year of the Flood; Anne Michaels – The Winter Vault; Jeanette Lynes – The Factory Voice; Annabel Lyon- The Golden Mean; Martha Baillie – The Incident Report; Kim Echlin – The Disappeared; Claire Holden Rothman – The Heart Specialist; Paulette Jiles – The Colour of Lightning; Kate Pullinger -  The Mistress of Nothing; Shani Mootoo  Valmiki’s Daughter

Here’s what the organization said when addressing the issue of how they got so many women nominees:

“The only instruction the jurors get is to pick good books,” she said. “[One of the jurors] Russell Banks told me that he was startled to see that most of their picks were female and only two male. He said they hadn’t given any thought to gender while reading the books at all.”

Winners receive $50,000.

And now for the bad news.

A new collection of interviews of horror writers done by the British Fantasy Society failed to include a single female author and women are pissed accusing the guys of sexism.  Surprisingly, the guys admit that the women are right.  Writer Maura McHugh got mad and posted this on her blog Splinster:

There are no excuses for this omission. That it happens, and it was allowed to happen, speaks to the deeply cultured disregard for women’s opinion in the world. I see it every day. We are marginalised, silenced, side-lined, forgotten, conveniently dropped, patronised, under-represented, dismissed, subtly intimidated and ignored.
I never want to see an all-male anthology or collection or essays/interviews in the speculative field again. Enough. It’s the 21st century. Women exist, we work in this field, and we deserve recognition. It’s that simple.

Here’s the apology from Guy Adams of the The British Fantasy Society

It was disgustingly simple for a man not to notice these things, a blindness to the importance of correct gender representation that I feel embarrassed to have fallen into. I can only apologise and hope that the discussion has made other editors and publishers realise that this kind of lazy sexism is unacceptable and to watch their own lists in future.

And from the editor of the book James Cooper

I’d like to stress that it was by no means intended, though I appreciate that this is perhaps the weakest kind of excuse one could offer.

It’s quite awesome that these guys accepted responsibility and admitted their sexism quickly but the biggest lesson for me here is the fact that Mr Cooper was able to pick out authors “who had influenced him over the last 25 years” and not a single woman came to his mind.  That’s the problem.

Women dominate 2009 Giller long list (Globe and Mail)

British Fantasy Society admits ‘lazy sexism’ over male-only horror book (The Guardian)

Tagged as: Margaret Atwood