Opinion: This International Women's Day, read a book written by a woman theglobeandmail.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theglobeandmail.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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What a glorious time it is to be an American woman novelist! Oprah Winfrey has only to say a writer’s name so far, most of her book-club choices have been novels by women and hundreds of thousands stampede the bookstores in search of the lucky author’s work. Most books are bought by women, who tend to read novels by female authors. One of our two living Nobel laureate novelists is an African-American woman. Women edit major magazines
The New Yorker,
The Nation,
The New York Review of Books aimed at readers of both sexes. Women are top decision makers at America’s ten biggest commercial publishing houses. And male editors, writers, and academics will be the first to tell you that they read and publish and teach writings by women as well as by men.
Things are stacked against women’s writing. Can a new prize for women writers really change things?
Novelist Shashi Deshpande fears the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction will not add dignity and prestige to women’s writing overnight. Feb 21, 2021 · 08:30 am Eimear McBride, winner of the 2014 Bailey s Women s Prize for Fiction, for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing . | Neil Hall / Reuters
The announcement of a prize for women writers in the USA and Canada, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, has attracted much attention for two reasons. One, the prize money is very large (150,000 Canadian dollars for the winner alone), next only to the Nobel Prize. And two, the prize is exclusively for women writers.