All-female finalists for best novel category show 'we don't need' an award exclusive to female novelists
The all-women shortlist for the novel category in this year's Costa Book Awards has rekindled the debate on whether the UK ought to continue with a prize dedicated exclusively to women's fiction, 17 years after the Orange prize for fiction was established to bring outstanding women writers to the attention of readers.
The Costa category shortlist comprises four women novelists, including Bernardine Bishop, who was selected posthumously for Unexpected Lessons in Love, as well as Kate Atkinson, Maggie O'Farrell and Evie Wyld.
The strong all-women line-up prompted Dame Antonia Fraser to question whether a prize for women writers was still needed. "Have women suddenly taken to writing better novels? I think possibly they have," she said, in a piece in the Times. "One thing it proves is that we don't need a women's prize. The only reason for having a prize for one sex was that women weren't getting fair treatment. That was the case when the Orange prize started."
The Orange prize for fiction was proposed in 1996 by a group of female and male journalists, reviewers, agents, librarians, publishers and booksellers, as a response to the Booker prize shortlist of 1991, which included no women at all. Winners have included Anne Michaels, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie and Marilynne Robinson.
Fraser is not the first female writer to question its validity. AS Byatt has described it as a "sexist prize" and has will not allow her novels to be entered. However, novelist Anne Enright, who won the 2007 Man Booker prize for her work, The Gathering, took the opposite view. She said: "Talk of 'better' books or 'more important' books by men or by women is always vague. Anyone who thinks that women get fair treatment should check out the VIDA statistics."
VIDA is an organisation which tracks the critical reception of women's creative writing, including counting the number of reviews of books written by women compared to reviews of books by men.
"The figures are shocking and incontrovertible. It's a moot point whether we 'need' a women's prize. Maybe women should have a prize, just because they can," Enright said.
Orange sponsored the prize for women's fiction from 1996 to 2012. The 2013 prize was without an official sponsor; and from 2014 will become the Baileys' Women's prize for fiction.
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