< Back to Blog

New Australian Fiction Prize for Women

Zora Sanders May 05

The Australian literary world has been abuzz today with the news that former Meanjin Editor Sophie Cunningham, along with Kerryn Goldsworthy and Kirsten Tranter, are looking to establish a prize for women’s fiction, along the lines of the U.K.’s Orange Prize.

I spoke to Sophie earlier today about the risks and rewards of setting up a prize just for women, and the underlying biases against women’s writing in Australia and the world.

Zora Sanders: Do you think there’s a risk that a women’s writing prize could in some ways ghettoise women’s writing, making it almost easier to ignore? The Orange Prize in the UK has avoided that, but do you think it’s a risk for a new prize?

Sophie Cunningham: It would be harder to ignore women’s writing more than it has been in recent years, I think! I also think it’s a good sign that the Orange Prize has avoided that accusation by and large and it is a new prize, really. It only started in 1996.

Inevitably people will express that concern, but I genuinely don’t share it. I feel that it’s more of a risk to do nothing. As I said in the Guardian article, sexism is ingrained in the arts industry (and many others). It is, unfortunately, necessary to find ways to draw the public’s attention to the work of women writers. I’d like to quote Alison Croggon on the subject – she expresses this better than me – ‘A world loaded in favour of one sex accounts for the pyramidal structure of gender. At the wide bottom of the writing world – the world of amateur writers on the internet, for instance – women, if anything, dominate. The closer you get to the top, the fewer women there are. And at the very top, as in this year’s Miles Franklin, the presence of women is an exception. What to do about it? One thing is certain: passively assuming women are equal and will gradually work their way to equal status doesn’t work. We need some different tools.’

This notion of needing different tools is behind our desire to set up the award.

I do find it interesting that people who would argue (correctly) that you can’t deny climate change because we have a few cool days in a row, or it’s been raining in Victoria this year – that is, who say you have to look at long term trends, are more than happy to say that it’s just been a bad year for women’s writing in the years in you which women are excluded. But I would say that while you can argue the toss about any given year you can’t argue with decades of systematic exclusion.

ZS: Is part of the problem perhaps that the type of fiction we consider ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ often revolves around men and men’s stories? Is there a bias against genre at work as well?

SC: I think that’s EXACTLY the problem. Couldn’t have put it better. Also, when men write novels drawn from life, it is still seen as literary, and serious, but these qualities in a work are used to dismiss books by women. And, when Alex Miller writes a deeply romantic novel, like Conditions of Faith, for example, it’s seen as literary, and when a women writes a similar novel (priests, longing, sex, France etc) it’s seen as a ‘romance’.

ZS: It seems to me that much of the problem is the internalised, almost unconscious bias against women’s writing that both men and women seem to be affected by. How do we start to address the impulse that automatically discounts a book as ‘serious’ when we see a woman’s name on the cover?

SC: You’ve put your finger on the problem. It is nebulous. It’s not easily solved. And I certainly agree that women share this bias with men, as well as being the victim of it. I think that making an effort to include more books my women on educational syllabi would help. as Louise Swinn pointed out in a panel we did together a couple of months ago that touched on this subject, there are a series of seminars, running over the next few months, on VCE English texts. Of 15 set texts discussed, only two of these were by women. “These are kids going through school and this is what they’re reading,” she said. “And then we tell the girls that their voices are just as worthwhile.”

And, I suppose, as this prize makes obvious, I think we all need to be proactive. Publishers have to stop insisting on twee covers for women’s books (have you read the Lionel Schriver article on this subject? ). Literary editors need to review more books by women and publish more reviews written by women. We all need to find ways to continue to advocate for women’s voices, in the face of ongoing marginalisation. And, to get back to your original question, to ignore the inevitable suggestion that to advocate in this way is tokenism.

You can read more about the proposed prize at the Guardian.

 

Our Friends

• Overland
• Alien Onion
• Ampersand Duck
• Andrew McDonald
• A Pair of Ragged Claws
• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Ben Eltham
• Bookshow blog
• CAL
• City of Tongues
• Crikey
• darkly wise, rudely great
• David Astle
• Elmo Keep Does Stuff
• The Ember
• Fly the Falcon blog
• Going Down Swinging
• Griffith Review
• Hackpacker
• Harvest
• HEAT
• Island
• Killings blog
• Literary Minded
• Lorraine Crescent
• Lynden Barber
• Mandy Ord
• Marcus Westbury
• Matilda
• Meanland
• Melbourne University Publishing
• Mel Campbell
• The Monthly
• Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
• Oslo Davis
• Paul Callaghan
• Read, Think, Write
• Sleepers Publishing
• Sorrow at Sills Bend
• SPLOG
• Tom Cho
• Virgule
• Wet Ink
• Wheeler Centre

Comments

 

Your name:

Your email address:

Your website:

Leave a comment:

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.