tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/literary-prizes-8234/articlesLiterary Prizes – The Conversation2023-11-22T10:27:37Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2148652023-11-22T10:27:37Z2023-11-22T10:27:37ZBooker prize 2023: the six shortlisted books reviewed by our experts<p><em>From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 26.</em></p>
<h2>Western Lane by Chetna Maroo</h2>
<p>Chetna Maroo’s subtle novel follows a British Asian girl, Gopi, who plays squash fiercely to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. </p>
<p>In Western Lane, the squash court becomes an arena for playing out the conflicting emotions flowing between a grieving father and his daughters. Here other tensions also come to the fore, such as her father’s memories of Mombasa in Kenya, the delicate negotiations between British people of diverse south Asian heritages and interracial tension and budding romance. </p>
<p>Powerful descriptions of the physicality of competitive racket sport are accompanied by evocative hints of Gujarati foodways and familial codes. Together, these aspects of Gopi’s life define her adolescent sensibility but also help alleviate loss. </p>
<p>This is a story that defies one genre. At once, Western Lane is a wonderful coming-of-age narrative about a girl navigating her adolescence – exploring identity, familial expectations, first love and more. </p>
<p>It is a story about grief and that which can often go unsaid in the process of mourning. It is also a sports story that uses the physical and mental demands of being an athlete to heighten its emotional narrative. A marvellous read. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, professor of English literature, King’s College London</em></p>
<h2>The Bee Sting by Paul Murray</h2>
<p>Paul Murray’s fourth novel, The Bee Sting, is a rare thing: a 600-page page-turner. It’s also a masterclass in narrative perspective. Starting off in the third person, four novella-length sections introduce us to the Barnes family. There’s failing car salesman Dickie, his frustrated wife Imelda, teenage Cass who dreams of life beyond small-town Ireland, and tween PJ who, like the rest of the family, is nurturing a secret. </p>
<p>The following section, Age of Loneliness, ricochets between the second-person viewpoints of the four protagonists, with brief snatches of ancillary perspectives as the narrative reaches its rapid-fire crescendo. It’s a novel about class and wealth, isolation and connectedness, and the secret histories that lie beneath a family’s stories of itself. </p>
<p>The Bee Sting’s occasional distractions, such as the sparing punctuation in Imelda’s sections, do not take away from its many successes: the gripping atmosphere, its capacity to surprise – even shock – and the rich symbolism that surrounds the titular wound. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Bethany Layne, senior lecturer in English literature, De Montfort University</em></p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-lynch-wins-booker-prize-2023-why-were-in-a-golden-age-of-irish-writing-217740">Paul Lynch wins Booker prize 2023: why we're in a 'golden age' of Irish writing</a>
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<h2>Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein</h2>
<p>Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is a polished pebble of a novel: opaque, contained, unyielding. The story seems to begin when the unnamed female narrator relocates to look after her elder brother, whose wife and children have left. </p>
<p>However, the narrator’s insistent attention on duty and deference is linked to echoes of historical oppression and exclusion rooted in her identity. Though not named, it is inferred by repeated allusions to her scapegoating by the Christian community she lives among.</p>
<p>While there are glimmers both of the narrator’s resistant subjectivity and of her reclaiming service as power, the story preserves its polished surface, committed only to studying obedience as a behaviour. </p>
<p>Not claiming to speak for anyone is part of the moral discipline the narrator prides herself on. But the absence of any dialogue and the sterility of the voice ultimately crafts a narrator who is constrained not just by her brother’s demands but by her own self-perception.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Alison Donnell, professor of modern literatures in English, University of East Anglia</em></p>
<h2>Prophet Song by Paul Lynch</h2>
<p>In his powerfully atmospheric fifth novel, Paul Lynch imagines a near-future Ireland that is inexorably mutating into a repressive, authoritarian state under the control of a right-wing populist government. The reader’s focalising guide to the novel’s ever-darkening moral universe is commercial scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack, who lives in suburban Dublin with her husband Larry, a teacher and trade unionist. </p>
<p>Larry’s summary arrest and detention by the newly formed secret police acts as the catalyst for Eilish’s awakening to the reality that “the state they live in has become a monster”. Once “the great waking begins”, the pace of Eilish’s engulfment by fear and panic accelerates precipitously, in tandem with the country’s spiralling descent into societal breakdown and civil strife. </p>
<p>Lynch’s dense, monolithic paragraphs potently enact Eilish’s tightening encirclement by malevolent forces, from which she desperately tries to shield her family. Prophet Song, like the best dystopian realism, exerts a compelling hold upon the imagination because of its chillingly plausible cautionary message.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Liam Harte, professor of Irish literature, University of Manchester</em></p>
<h2>If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffrey</h2>
<p>If I Survive You tells the interconnected stories of the men from a Jamaican family that migrate to Miami. The novel moves between stories from brothers Trelawny and Delano, their father Topper and their cousin Cukie as they navigate issues of belonging, racial identity, displacement, father-son relationships and hurricanes in 20th- and 21st-century America.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most striking element of Escoffrey’s novel is its lyrical narrative voice. It moves between characters and between first, second and third person to create a kaleidoscopic, cinematic meditation on black masculinity and the immigrant experience. </p>
<p>The novel’s opening chapter recounts Trelawny’s childhood experiences. He reflects on being asked “What are you?” in relation to his racial identity. Escoffery does a skillful job of highlighting the complexities of this question, and the ways in which blackness is understood differently across cultures.</p>
<p>If I Survive You is a beautifully written novel that introduces many unforgettable characters, captivates its reader with humour and heart, and demonstrates Escoffrey’s unmistakable aptitude for the art of storytelling.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Leighan Renaud, lecturer in Caribbean literatures and cultures, University of Bristol</em></p>
<h2>This Other Eden by Paul Harding</h2>
<p>The title of Paul Harding’s richly textured novel, with its wry invocation of Shakespeare’s scepter’d isle, points to the long literary legacy of islands as places of imaginative possibilities. </p>
<p>The story explores the shattering of a mixed-heritage community on the fictional Apple Island, off the coast of Maine, by racist forces of missionary zeal and eugenicist thought. A dazzling array of narrative perspectives bring this world to intense sensory life. </p>
<p>The novel’s elaborate, dreamlike prose sits uneasily at times with the brutal dispossessions of American history, especially the fates of the real-life Malaga Islanders. Its plot strains to accommodate the complexities of transatlantic slavery, colonial conquest and Irish settler diaspora. </p>
<p>Yet Harding’s work is best read, not as historical fiction, but rather as a form of speculative writing. This Other Eden imagines vivid possibilities for human connection, dignity and hope – even as it reminds us of the terrible fragility of these visions.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Muireann O'Cinneide, lecturer in English, University of Galway</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize.Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA Professor of English Literature, King's College LondonAlison Donnell, Professor of Modern Literatures in English, University of East AngliaBethany Layne, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort UniversityLeighan M Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Department of English, University of BristolLiam Harte, Professor of Irish Literature, University of ManchesterMuireann O'Cinneide, Lecturer in English, University of GalwayLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2161622023-10-24T03:45:14Z2023-10-24T03:45:14ZA light touch, a feel for drama and a generous nature: author Alex Skovron wins the Patrick White Award<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555474/original/file-20231024-17-wk6ce7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alex Skovron, centre, and at a book launch at Collected Works on right. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Perpetual Group, author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you have ever been to the launch of a small-press poetry book at <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/poetry-bookshop-collected-works-reaches-its-final-stanza-20181019-h16ujt.html">Collected Works</a> bookshop (now defunct), or at one of the Readings bookstores, or at a bar or café in Melbourne, you may have seen a small, fit-looking, bespectacled man. He has a ready grin and eyes that invite you in – often to a conversation you’ll remember for its warmth, intelligence, wit and passion for literature. </p>
<p>You will have encountered Alex Skovron, who has this year won the Patrick White Literary Award for his achievements in poetry and prose and his lifelong support for writers and writing in Melbourne and beyond. </p>
<p>This prize is awarded to a writer who might not have received the recognition that is due when that writer’s full contributions and achievements are considered. Writers do belong to a community, even if it is fractured, fractious, garrulous and competitive at times. The community is best characterised, though, by acts of generosity towards each other, and Skovron has been a behind-the-scenes master of generosity towards other writers. </p>
<p>Author of seven books of poetry and three works of fiction, Skovron has previously won the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards for a first book of poetry, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for poetry (twice), John Shaw Neilson Poetry award (twice) and Australian Book Review (now Peter Porter) Prize for a single poem. His novella, The Poet, was co-winner of the Christina Stead Prize in 2005. </p>
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<p>Skovron worked as an editor for two Australian encyclopedia projects during the 1970s, then from 1980 with publishers Macmillan, Hutchinson, Dent and finally, Houghton Mifflin. Alongside this work, his quiet and sustained impact on poets and poetry in Melbourne has been immense. </p>
<p>Hundreds of poets, especially the young and emerging, have been edited, mentored and encouraged by Skovron. It is common to pick up a new book of poetry in Melbourne and find his name there on the acknowledgements page. He has offered reliable and consistent support to others for decades. </p>
<p>Born in Poland in 1948 and arriving in Australia via Israel as a ten-year-old, Skovron’s cultural and intellectual reach has always been global. </p>
<p>His work has been translated into French, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Czech, Macedonian and German. He has worked with his Czech translator, Josef Tomáš on book-length translations into English of two 20th-century Czech poets and his latest book, <a href="https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/letters-from-the-periphery/">Letters from the Periphery</a>, includes his translation of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. </p>
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<p>It is a shame poetry is not more widely read, enjoyed and appreciated in Australia. Skovron’s poetry has been wonderfully enriching, entertaining and provocative to its readers since his first published book, The Rearrangement, in 1988. His poems work attentively with shifts in tone and attitude, surprising line endings, pauses and rushes of thoughts and connections always towards an elegance toughened by life experience. </p>
<p>One poem, chosen almost at random, showcases these qualities: </p>
<p>For Light<br></p>
<blockquote>
<p>If one is to be awoken by a cliché <br>
the clatter of breakfast dishes is as good <br>
as any, or the aroma of coffee <br>
freshly brewed, or that uncanny mood <br>
of holiday immensity, when the world<br>
was twelve, or a summer’s garden when the world<br></p>
<p>was good. Worst is the midnight<br>
phonecall, or the way the disentangled mind<br>
can brood a black density into being – <br>
in the darknesses before seeing, lusting for light. <br></p>
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<p>(from <a href="https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/towards-the-equator-new-selected-poems/">Towards the Equator: New & Selected</a>)</p>
<p>His touch is light, his material is the experiences he knows and we do too and his feel for the drama lying in store for the most ordinary of us (living our clichéd lives) is somehow both seriously disturbing and finally settling. </p>
<p>He has been a poet who appreciates the largely unappreciated and passed-over aspects of workplaces, homes, marriages, streets and minds. So it is perhaps fitting he has now been recognised with a national award at 75. Perhaps at that moment in a life when a poet might think he has already passed unrecognised from most people’s view. </p>
<p>His poetry and his fiction surprisingly often turn to the Kafkaesque figure of an isolated everyman living slightly desperately but with an almost limitless potential for irony and humour. </p>
<p>One more poem offers a witty glimpse of this figure:</p>
<p>Homo Singularis </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He would drive his car on the wrong side<br>
of the seat, tried to obtain a licence to kill<br>
time, at work he displayed considerable skill<br>
at incompetence, at home he had to hide<br>
the dismissal notes under the mattress he screwed<br>
to the carpeted floor with nails. Rude<br></p>
<p>he was to a fault, nosey to boot,<br>
inconsiderate to snails, he locked himself into books<br>
of stamps and common prayer, funnelled his looks<br>
into singles bars and hardly ever stepped foot<br>
inside a song. Even his poems were too long. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-city-sonnetinas-Alex-Skovron/dp/0864185766">Infinite City: 100 Sonnetinas</a>) </p>
<p>To add to the detailed fun Skovron has with his compositions, we might notice the last line of this poem is its eleventh – in a book devoted to ten-line poems. </p>
<p>I would like to read, one day, Alex’s poem about this man receiving an award such as this.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216162/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Melbourne writer Alex Skovron has been recognised with a national award at 75. Alongside his own work, Skovron’s quiet impact on poets and poetry in Melbourne has been immense.Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2029582023-04-26T13:01:28Z2023-04-26T13:01:28ZStella Prize shortlist 2023: your guide to 6 gripping, courageous books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522540/original/file-20230424-28-jb0iol.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C3994%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Stella Prize</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Stella Prize has shown that feminist activism in the literary sector can work. At its outset, in 2013, it drew attention to the lack of women on prize shortlists.</p>
<p>Over time, it appears to have shifted prize culture in this county to the point that it seems unlikely that we’ll see a “sausagefest” shortlist again any time soon. And Stella’s regular <a href="https://theconversation.com/something-remarkable-has-happened-to-australias-book-pages-gender-equality-has-become-the-norm-177362">count</a> of gender in Australian book reviewing has ensured editors think about the gender of the authors they review and the writers who review them. </p>
<p>Prizes can also be responsible for more subtle shifts in literary culture. The Stella Prize has challenged implicit, ingrained ideas about what a prize-winning book should look like. Its shortlists have foregrounded books that are idiosyncratic, activist and challenging. This year’s shortlist is no exception, for the most part steering away from established authors and major presses.</p>
<p>Taken together, the books on this year’s Stella shortlist suggest something about the forms of courage at work in Australian women’s writing at the moment: the courage to continue culture in the wake of colonial violence, to take political and personal risks in writing about a repressive regime, to write in the face of death and grief, stigma and taboo. </p>
<p>There is also courage in representing women who manifestly do not “keep it together” in their roles as mothers, partners, and friends, or who “let themselves go” in terms of not maintaining the forms of bodily or emotional control society expects of them. To read these works is to be gripped and compelled: they will stay with you.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/something-remarkable-has-happened-to-australias-book-pages-gender-equality-has-become-the-norm-177362">Something remarkable has happened to Australia's book pages: gender equality has become the norm</a>
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<h2>We Come With This Place by Debra Dank</h2>
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<p>What strikes me most about <a href="https://www.echopublishing.com.au/books/we-come-with-this-place">this multi-generational memoir</a> is its generosity. Here, Debra Dank pulls the reader close and shares stories not only about her childhood, but also her ancestors and her children. Many voices are present here, but the reader is guided by the warmth and humour of the narrating voice, and by the vivid details about place and culture it provides. </p>
<p>This is a story of family, connection and Country, thriving despite the trauma inflicted by racist violence. Its segments each recount an aspect of Dank’s life story as it intertwines with Gudanji/Wakaja Country and history; incidents from her life share space with stories of her parents, grandparents and then her children. </p>
<p>Many of these stories are concrete moments of memory that do not look away from a violent history, but which are determinedly focused on community and continuance. I emerged from this book grateful to Dank for being willing to share it with us as readers.</p>
<h2>big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills</h2>
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<p>This is a work of memoir, theory, art history and visual essay, in which Eloise Grills tackles the big question of how women are impacted by how their bodies are seen by others. A series of essays illustrated by Grills’ arresting artwork, invite us to think about the fat body in culture, and how it feels to grow up and be seen as a fat woman.</p>
<p>The effect is frank and visceral: this combination of forms and media enables Grills to speak in multiple, conflicted ways about how women’s senses of their bodies are so intensely felt and yet socially circumscribed. She does not shy away from critique – her art and words share the page with quotes by cultural critics and theorists thinking about the effect misogyny has on women’s bodily experience – but there is also celebration and community here, especially in her tributes to an unsung history of “fat lady painters”. </p>
<p>This work also does some big thinking about the complicated history of women’s confessional writing and art, and how the act of confession is now shaped and monetised by social media.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/big-beautiful-females-and-familiar-dystopias-new-graphic-nonfiction-interrogates-21st-century-life-182224">Big beautiful females and familiar dystopias: new graphic nonfiction interrogates 21st-century life</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt</h2>
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<p>Sarah Holland-Batt is the most established author on this year’s shortlist. <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/the-jaguar">The Jaguar</a>, her third book, is a powerful collection of poetry. Its strongest poems turn to scenes most people would turn away from: her father’s slow death from Parkinson’s, complete with hospital visits, dementia, grief. </p>
<p>In these poems, the devastating, mundane world of the hospital and nursing home takes on a glowing life: the brilliant opening poem envisions the speaker’s father as a giant koi, “guiding the mottled zeppelin / of his body in a single unceasing turn”, surfacing when the nurses bring his dinner. In another, the speaker’s mother is in hospital, listening to David Attenborough, and the ward and the world of his documentary become entangled: “Buzzers / zip and sting like electric / whipbirds.” </p>
<p>There are some dramatic tonal shifts across this collection, from these stunning hospital poems to others about travel, love and sex. Throughout, Holland-Batt uses form and language purposefully, with the deftness and confidence of a poet who knows exactly what she is doing.</p>
<h2>Hydra by Adriane Howell</h2>
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<p>This debut novel is a taut and page-turning account of a woman who manifestly does not “keep it together”. Anja finds herself separated from her husband and her cherished career as a specialist in mid-century modern furniture, living in an isolated house in the middle of a navy base. </p>
<p>In this evocatively spooky place she falls in thrall to a mysterious creature that may or may not be an urban myth. She is a woman who does not do what her work or her friends or her partner expect of her, but she’s no misfit hero: she’s a hot mess. </p>
<p>I love this novel’s attention to the world of work and its expectations, and the complexities of female friendship. Objects take on talismanic emotional qualities and become, in their own ways, drivers of its plot. <a href="https://transitlounge.com.au/shop/hydra/">Hydra</a> is a new take on the gothic representation of a place with a layered history. It is detailed, memorable and difficult to put down.</p>
<h2>Indelible City by Louisa Lim</h2>
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<p>Louisa Lim uses a combination of memoir, biography and historical research to tell a layered story about Hong Kong’s history and present. It is at once a story of her own experiences of growing up in Hong Kong, a historical account of Hong Kong’s complex colonial history and the story of a street artist and garbage collector, Tsang Tsou-choi, who calls himself the King of Kowloon. </p>
<p>His sense of disinheritance, and his determination to paint wonky calligraphy all over the city that is painted over, but also sold in art galleries, is used by Lim to think about the city’s past and its heartbreaking recent history <a href="https://theconversation.com/beijing-is-moving-to-stamp-out-the-hong-kong-protests-but-it-may-have-already-lost-the-city-for-good-121815">of protest</a> and suppression. It is also used to think about Lim’s own position as a journalist and woman who grew up in Hong Kong. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/indelible-city-dispossession-and-defiance-in-hong-kong">Indelible City</a> ends up eschewing the possibility of journalistic detachment in the face of seeing a vibrant city become subject to an authoritarian regime. Lim decides to pick up the paintbrush herself, and tells a story that is unashamedly activist. The result is an account that is both painstakingly researched and gripping to read.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/louisa-lims-outstanding-portrait-of-a-dispossessed-defiant-hong-kong-is-the-activist-journalism-we-need-179091">Louisa Lim's 'outstanding' portrait of a dispossessed, defiant Hong Kong is the activist journalism we need</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston</h2>
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<p>The figure of Veda Gray, the mother of <a href="https://www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product.php?productid=1781">this novel</a>’s title, draws from many female artists across history who have produced art in the face of a social structure that makes it very difficult to do so. </p>
<p>Aspects of her story echo that of Australian poet <a href="https://theconversation.com/gwen-harwood-was-one-of-australias-finest-poets-she-was-also-one-of-the-most-subversive-183637">Gwen Harwood</a>, who found it impossible to get her poetry published under her own name, but remarkably easy under a male pseudonym. In her anger, Harwood published a sonnet that said, when read acrostically: FUCK ALL EDITORS. Veda undertakes a similar protest, but with devastating personal impact. </p>
<p>Like Harwood, Veda writes poetry about aspects of women’s daily lives in housework and caregiving that are considered unworthy of poetry by male gatekeepers. Veda is unruly, in disarray, a “bad mother” who makes a difficult bargain with a rich couple to share care of her son. She is joined in an evocatively detailed world of restaurants and art in 1960s Melbourne by a cast of other women artists whose brilliance finds varied paths to light. </p>
<p>Preston uses Veda, and the narrating figure of her son Owen, to think about the choices women have to make – now as in the past – between their own creative achievement and what society expects of them as mothers and wives.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202958/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julieanne Lamond receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She has undertaken research, with Melinda Harvey, for the Stella Count. </span></em></p>The 6 books on this year’s Stella Prize shortlist – including poetry, memoir, fiction and reportage – are idiosyncratic, activist and compelling.Julieanne Lamond, Senior Lecturer in English, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1962172022-12-13T02:33:47Z2022-12-13T02:33:47ZThe Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have proved contentious, but this year’s winners are worth celebrating<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500571/original/file-20221212-25-dtcwh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=634%2C0%2C3275%2C1640&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Winners of the 2022 Prime Minister's Literary Awards: Nicolas Rothwell, Mark Willacy, Sherryl Clark, Andy Jackson, Christine Helliwell and Leanne Hall.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced this morning at a ceremony in Launceston. This year’s <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist">shortlists</a> presented a challenge for the judges, who selected 30 titles from more than 540 eligible entries. </p>
<p>The winning books in each category are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>Fiction</strong>: <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist/red-heaven">Red Heaven</a> – Nicolas Rothwell (Text Publishing)</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Poetry</strong>: <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist/human-looking">Human Looking</a> – Andy Jackson (Giramondo) </p></li>
<li><p><strong>Non-fiction</strong>: <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist/rogue-forces-explosive-insiders-account-australian-sas-war-crimes-afghanistan">Rogue Forces: An explosive insiders’ account of Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan</a> – Mark Willacy (Simon & Schuster)</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Australian history</strong>: <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist/semut-untold-story-secret-australian-operation-wwii-borneo">Semut: The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo</a> – Christine Helliwell (Michael Joseph)</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Children’s literature</strong>: <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist/mina-and-whole-wide-world">Mina and the Whole Wide World</a> – Sherryl Clark and Briony Stewart (University of Queensland Press)</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Young adult literature</strong>: <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards/shortlist/gaps-leanne-hall">The Gaps</a> – Leanne Hall (Text Publishing) </p></li>
</ul>
<h2>Criticisms</h2>
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<p>The awards have a short and occasionally contentious history. This year, they were met with strong criticism.</p>
<p>Given the “consecrating” value accorded to literary awards, the judging panels are closely scrutinised. The panels are a measure of credibility; they define the notions of literary merit upon which the awards are based. </p>
<p>This year Peter Rose, editor of Australian Book Review, <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/984-december-2022-no-449/9918-editorial-the-narrow-road-to-influence">called out</a> the judging panels as Sydney-centric. Central to his critique was the clear links of six judges with the Murdoch-owned NewsCorp papers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Remarkably, six of those ten judges have close associations with The Australian newspaper. This includes no less than three literary editors (including the current one, Caroline Overington). The other three are Troy Bramston, a senior writer and columnist with The Australian, Peter Craven (a frequent columnist), and Chris Mitchell, a former editor-in-chief (2002–15) and current columnist.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>The 2022 panels were appointed by the previous federal government. Rose sees the composition of the panels as evidence of the Morrison government’s “cosy association with News Corp”, the charge of partisanship evoking wider conversations about the “stacking” of cultural institutions. </p>
<p>Indeed the July 2022 Grattan Institute report, <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/report/new-politics-public-appointments/">New politics: A better process for public appointments</a>, shows that “pork-barrelling” and “jobs for mates” can have a corrosive effect on our democratic institutions, seriously affecting the impartiality of decision-making.</p>
<p>Literary prizes are inherently if implicitly political; the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are explicitly so. One of their peculiarities is that they are bestowed at the prerogative of the prime minister, who can overrule the decisions of the judging panels. </p>
<p>The timing of the awards also came in for criticism this year. Although they represent a significant injection of funds into the literary sector, the benefits would be greater if there were time for titles to build momentum. </p>
<p>The shortlist was not announced until November 7 2022, and the announcement of the winners is timed to fit around the prime minister’s schedule and parliamentary sitting requirements. But the mid-December date is not ideal for its visibility. It allows little notice for the publishing and bookselling industries to spotlight titles for Christmas, which inevitably affects potential sales. As Mark Rubbo, managing director of independent bookshop chain Readings, told Peter Rose:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are the worst-run prizes in Australia; there is no consistency in the timing of the announcements of either the shortlist or the winner, giving neither booksellers nor publishers the opportunity to promote the shortlisted and winning authors.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/two-thirds-of-australian-authors-are-women-new-research-finds-they-earn-just-18-200-a-year-from-their-writing-195426">Two thirds of Australian authors are women – new research finds they earn just $18,200 a year from their writing</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<h2>History of the awards</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500305/original/file-20221212-94261-em7gyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The winners of the 2022 awards each receive A$80,000 tax-free, with shortlisted authors receiving $5,000 each. It’s a substantial prize, but not the highest amount of money for a literary award – the Victorian Prize for Literature offers $100,000.</p>
<p>The awards are intended to recognise individual excellence and the contribution Australian authors make to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. They have evolved every year since their inauguration by Kevin Rudd in 2008. </p>
<p>In 2008 and 2009, awards were given in the fiction and non-fiction categories. In 2010, the awards were expanded to include young adult and children’s fiction. The decision to reward all the shortlisted authors was made in 2011. This was a widely applauded move. </p>
<p>There is growing public awareness of author poverty, with a 2022 <a href="https://australiacouncil.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/2022-national-survey-of-australian-book-authors/">Macquarie University study</a> finding that the average income is $18,200 per annum.</p>
<p>In 2012, the poetry category was added and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History was incorporated into the Awards. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500220/original/file-20221211-90146-ktdtu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Kevin Rudd with novelist Steven Conte at the first Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in September 2008.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Porritt/AAP</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/something-remarkable-has-happened-to-australias-book-pages-gender-equality-has-become-the-norm-177362">Something remarkable has happened to Australia's book pages: gender equality has become the norm</a>
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<h2>Literature and diversity</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500307/original/file-20221212-96198-65pkn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The inauguration of the <a href="https://stella.org.au/about/">Stella Prize</a> for women’s writing and the associated <a href="https://stella.org.au/initiatives/research/">Stella Count</a> have sharpened our focus on questions of gender and diversity in the awarding of prizes and in literary reviewing.</p>
<p>The Prime Minister’s awards are beginning to mirror the multiplicity of modern Australia. This year’s shortlists included five First Nations authors, with one in every category except history. The young adult category was the most diverse, containing two authors of Asian-Australian heritage, Leanne Hall and Rebecca Lim, and one of Muslim-Australian heritage, Safdar Ahmed. </p>
<p>Andy Jackson’s winning poetry collection, Human Looking, elevates the profile of disabled poetics and “<a href="https://www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/writing-disability-in-australia">crip culture</a>” more broadly. </p>
<p>The gender mix is relatively even, an overall trend that aligns with Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond’s <a href="https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/stella-count-crashes-through-the-gender-parity-barrier">report</a>, released in March 2022, which found that gender parity was becoming a reality when it comes to prizes.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500310/original/file-20221212-97751-uu5no9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Minister for the Arts Tony Burke has been open about his love of literature. In his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXwb-YOkgFQ&ab_channel=AustralianSocietyofAuthors">Colin Simpson Memorial Keynote</a> for the Australian Society of Authors on 15 November, he revealed that he reads a poem each day. Among his favourite local works are Tara June Winch’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yield-wins-the-miles-franklin-a-powerful-story-of-violence-and-forms-of-resistance-142284">The Yield</a> (which <a href="https://theconversation.com/prime-ministers-literary-awards-the-yield-and-the-lost-arabs-throw-fragile-lines-across-cultural-and-linguistic-divides-151848">won the fiction category</a> of the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards) and <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dystopian-or-utopian-future-claire-g-colemans-new-novel-enclave-imagines-both-182859">Claire G. Coleman</a>’s Terra Nullius. </p>
<p>A government that says “you are creators, you are workers and you are required” has been missing for a decade, Burke said. In his new role, he has pledged to improve authors’ conditions.</p>
<p>University of Melbourne publishing and communications scholar Alexandra Dane has <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003124160-20/literary-prizes-public-sphere-alexandra-dane">argued</a> that “literary prizes have long served as a shorthand for the nation’s understanding of what constitutes literary value”. Prize culture is a flawed mechanism for establishing that value. The choice of an ultimate winner also involves the elevation of one set of values at the expense of others. </p>
<p>Whatever their shortcomings, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards still expose works of literature to new readers and enhance their chances in a crowded market. Two of the finalists, the poet Jordie Albiston and musician <a href="https://theconversation.com/archie-roach-the-great-songman-tender-and-humble-who-gave-our-people-a-voice-187974">Archie Roach</a>, are no longer with us, but their shortlisting recognises the excellence of their late works. </p>
<p>In common with other <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/oct/18/booker-prize-history-controversy-criticism">controversial prizes</a>, the awards are fought over precisely because of their symbolic and enduring cultural function.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196217/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brigid Magner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced. The awards are contentious – but are fought over precisely because of their symbolic and enduring cultural functionBrigid Magner, Associate Professor in Literary Studies, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1777072022-02-28T07:55:50Z2022-02-28T07:55:50ZIndigenous voices, #MeToo and disrupting genre: how the tenth Stella longlist reflects its mission of creating change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448854/original/file-20220228-15-mgsr7j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The first three winners of the Stella Prize, at the 2015 ceremony. Left to right: Clare Wright (2014, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka), inaugural winner Carrie Tiffany (2013, Mateship with Birds) and Emily Bitto (2015, The Strays).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Stella Prize, Connor Tomas O'Brien</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Now in its tenth year, the Stella Prize – <a href="https://stella.org.au/2021/08/stellas-story/">founded as a reaction to the under-representation of women in Australian literary culture</a> – has been a force for change. As conversations about representation continue to evolve, the prize does too.</p>
<p>This year’s longlist, just announced, reflects those conversations. </p>
<p>For example, five of the 12 longlisted writers are Indigenous. One writer is non-binary (the first non-binary writer to be recognised was just last year). And in the first year that poetry is eligible, there are three poetry collections (plus one hybrid collection). Overall, it’s a longlist that adventurously moves across genres.</p>
<p>The prize continues to recognise new and younger writers: seven of the longlisted titles are first books. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448851/original/file-20220228-25-19ethq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The 2022 Stella Prize longlist is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/growing-age-terror/">Coming of Age in the War on Terror</a> by <strong>Randa Abdel-Fattah</strong> (New South Books)</p>
<p><a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/eunice-andrada-take-care/">TAKE CARE</a> by <strong>Eunice Andrada</strong> (Giramondo Publishing)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/dropbear">Dropbear</a> by <strong>Evelyn Araluen</strong> (University of Queensland Press)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/She-Is-Haunted-Paige-Clark-9781760879976">She is Haunted</a> by <strong>Paige Clark</strong> (Allen & Unwin)</p>
<p><a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/no-document/">No Document</a> by <strong>Anwen Crawford</strong> (Giramondo Publishing)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/bodies-of-light">Bodies of Light</a> by <strong>Jennifer Down</strong> (Text Publishing)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Bila-Yarrudhanggalangdhuray/Anita-Heiss/9781760850449">Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray</a> by <strong>Anita Heiss</strong> (Simon & Schuster)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/stone-fruit">Stone Fruit</a> by <strong>Lee Lai</strong> (Fantagraphics)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/permafrost">Permafrost</a> by <strong>S.J. Norman</strong> (University of Queensland Press)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.magabala.com/products/homecoming">Homecoming</a> by <strong>Elfie Shiosaki</strong> (Magabala Books)</p>
<p><a href="https://corditebooks.org.au/products/the-open">The Open</a> by <strong>Lucy Van</strong> (Cordite Books)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/another-day-in-the-colony">Another Day in the Colony</a> by <strong>Chelsea Watego</strong> (University of Queensland Press)</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448839/original/file-20220228-14-83pugq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<h2>Life-changing win means inclusion is important</h2>
<p>For a writer, winning the Stella Prize is an economic and symbolic bonanza, guaranteeing sales, prestige, $A50,000 in prize money, and an associated stream of income from book tours and festivals. </p>
<p>After winning the Stella Prize last year for her novel The Bass Rock, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-22/stella-prize-winner-evie-wyld-the-bass-rock-gothic/100086620">Evie Wyld said</a> that even the money she had received for her longlisting ($1000) and shortlisting ($2000) helped her to survive during a time of pandemic and lockdowns. </p>
<p>“It really [did] mean that I don’t have to look for work elsewhere and so I can get on with writing”. </p>
<p>The stakes of the win make questions of inclusion – and who can benefit from the opportunities offered by the prize – especially important.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448835/original/file-20220228-26-1rd0003.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Evie Wyld said her Stella Prize win enabled her to write during the pandemic, and not look for work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/">State Library of NSW/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Nine of ten Miles Franklin winners have been women since the Stella Prize launched</h2>
<p>The Stella Prize was created in 2012, as a response to all-male shortlists for the Miles Franklin Award in 2009 and 2011. The Miles Franklin Award had been dominated by male writers since its inception in 1957. </p>
<p>Since the Stella Prize began, nine of the past ten Miles Franklin Award winners have been women. In 2013, the year after the first Stella Prize was awarded, <a href="https://theconversation.com/this-years-miles-franklin-is-all-woman-13833">the Miles Franklin shortlist was all women for the first time</a>. </p>
<p>Since 2016, five of the six winners of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction (one of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards) have been women. </p>
<h2>Gender gap continues – except in poetry</h2>
<p><a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0">A 2020 study</a> found a continuing gender gap in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards (1979-2015), the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (1985-2015), and the Miles Franklin Award (1965-2015), except in the genre of poetry. </p>
<p>It discovered that women were 29% of the Miles Franklin Award winners and 30% of winners of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. </p>
<p>Figures for other prizes were 39% for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 30% for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 36% for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, and 48% for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. </p>
<p>The Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Poetry was the only prize where the majority of the winners were women (53%). </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="woman speaking at podium" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448832/original/file-20220228-25-1lb27o3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis Wright at Stella Prize Award Night Credit Connor Tomas OBrien x.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stella Prize</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<h2>Criticisms: overwhelming whiteness and calls for attention to diversity</h2>
<p>Prizes for women’s writing are <a href="https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/stella-prize-sends-a-message-that-women-are-incapable-of-competing-intellectually-with-men-nicolle-flint/news-story/4e933e5d9923ca9ba623458c8fb8ff6e">sometimes criticised</a> for <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/sonya-harnett-on-children-golden-boys-the-stella-prize-and-animals/news-story/b6b7f80bada1904a5e83bf1684a32a2d">hiving off women’s writing</a>, or somehow marking it as secondary to that of their male contemporaries. <a href="https://cherwell.org/2020/09/23/a-prize-of-ones-own-do-we-really-need-the-womens-prize-for-fiction/">These arguments</a> seem to assume that prizes exist in a bubble, ignoring the surrounding power structures that shape the literary field.</p>
<p>The Stella Prize has also been criticised for the whiteness of its longlist choices. Alexis Wright is the only writer of colour <a href="https://theconversation.com/alexis-wright-wins-2018-stella-prize-for-tracker-an-epic-feat-of-aboriginal-storytelling-94906">to be awarded the prize</a>, for <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/tracker/">Tracker</a> in 2018. </p>
<p>While the Stella Prize is the organisation’s best known initiative, it also generates school resources and events, and its Stella Count surveys the extent of gender bias in book reviews. </p>
<p>The Stella Count has helped to close the gender gap in book reviewing, but has been criticised for not including authors who are non-binary and for <a href="https://theconversation.com/diversity-the-stella-count-and-the-whiteness-of-australian-publishing-69976">not considering diversity</a>. </p>
<h2>Genre, marginalisation and cultural value</h2>
<p>Feminist approaches to Australian literature have often overlooked genre as an issue. Yet the marginalisation or exclusion of particular genres in criticism and literary prizes influences how different kinds of literature are culturally valued. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448833/original/file-20220228-15-1l0xo4a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Three poetry books are longlisted this year: Eunice Andrada’s TAKE CARE, Evelyn Araluen’s Drop Bear and <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-poetic-metre-53364">Lucy Van</a>’s The Open. Yet the longlist foregrounds the limits of generic categories. Araluen and Van’s collections include prose poetry, and Elfie Shiosaki’s hyrbid collection, Homecoming, draws together poetry, prose and the colonial archive to tell family stories that have been historically positioned outside literature. Anwen Crawford’s No Document blends the essay with lyric, and makes use of blank space to meditate on ephemeral art practice and lost friendship.</p>
<p>The longlist also includes a graphic novel. Lee Lai’s <a href="https://granta.com/stone-fruit/">Stone Fruit</a> contrasts the joy within a chosen queer family with the difficulties that emerge when trying to navigate older family ties and lack of acceptance. </p>
<p>Many longlisted works are hybrid in form, conveying complex ideas and feelings. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Coming of Age in the War on Terror draws together memoir, historical record, and interviews to explore the impact of Islamophobia on the generation of children after 9/11. </p>
<h2>Calling out colonial violence</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448830/original/file-20220228-4024-1nslqy1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The five Indigenous writers on the longlist share a focus on intergenerational memory, calling out colonialism’s ongoing violence. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/chelsea-bond-the-new-closing-the-gap-is-about-buzzwords-not-genuine-change-for-indigenous-australia-143681">Chelsea Watego</a> is scathing about a discourse of hope, instead proposing a life of sovereignty, activism and joy. Evelyn Araluen casts a sharp eye over the racism of early children’s literature and the settler-colonial myths and desires that shape suburbia and poetry. <a href="https://theconversation.com/speaking-with-author-anita-heiss-on-growing-up-aboriginal-in-australia-102644">Anita Heiss</a> celebrates Wiradyuri language in her historical novel, which revisits Wiradyuri bravery during the 1852 flood of Gundagai. </p>
<h2>Thinking beyond Australia</h2>
<p>Many of the longlisted writers explore how histories continue to shape places and everyday life. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448834/original/file-20220228-15-qsxkr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Lucy Van’s long poems meditate on aspects of familiarity, privacy and security. Indigneous writer S.J. Norman considers how ghosts haunt the contemporary consciousness at sites of past trauma. Paige Clark examines how young women of colour navigate expectations that come from within the family as much as without, and sometimes surreal strategies used to cope with vulnerability. Eunice Andrada explores how sexualised violence intersects with racism in war crimes, rape culture, harassment, and stereotypes. </p>
<h2>Stella and Miles</h2>
<p>Literary prizes operate in a shared ecology. Yes, the Stella Prize has significantly influenced the Miles Franklin Award, whose founder (<a href="https://theconversation.com/reclaim-her-name-why-we-should-free-australias-female-novelists-from-their-male-pseudonyms-144404">Stella Maria Miles Franklin</a>) it was named for. But the Stella Prize has also benefited from that prize’s authority.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="woman standing with umbrella, side on, wearing hat" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448836/original/file-20220228-23-1xxj1p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Miles Franklin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of NSW/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Alexis Wright received a Miles Franklin Award eleven years before her Stella Prize. Evie Wyld also won the Miles Franklin Award, with <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/all-the-birds-singing-9780143791034">All the Birds, Singing</a>, seven years before her Stella win. This year’s chair of the Stella Prize, Melissa Lucashenko, <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-wit-and-tenderness-miles-franklin-winner-melissa-lucashenko-writes-back-to-the-whitemans-world-121176">was the 2019 Miles Franklin Award winner</a> for Too Much Lip. South African activist Sisonke Msimang was on the judging panel for both the 2021 Miles Franklin Award and the 2022 Stella Prize. Melinda Harvey, co-leader of the 2018 Stella Count, was a judge of the Miles Franklin Award from 2017 to 2021.</p>
<p>While such overlaps suggest a decreasing distinction between the two prizes, their missions are distinctly different. The Miles Franklin is guided by its founder’s desire to annually reward “a novel of the highest literary merit that presents Australian life in any of its phases”. </p>
<p>The Stella Prize’s mission is “to promote Australian women’s writing, support greater participation in the world of books, and create a more equitable and vibrant national culture”. </p>
<p>It is inherently about change – as reflected in the 2022 longlist.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177707/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ann Vickery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As conversations about literary representation evolve, so does the Stella Prize. Five of the 12 authors on the tenth Stella Prize longlist are Indigenous, one is non-binary, and genre is in the mix.Ann Vickery, Professor in Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1712552021-11-06T09:46:12Z2021-11-06T09:46:12ZBooker Prize: Damon Galgut’s The Promise is a reminder of South Africa’s continued and difficult journey to a better future<p><em>This article may contain spoilers.</em></p>
<p>Damon Galgut, a white South African playwright and novelist, has won the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/112/1120336/the-promise/9781784744069.html">The Promise</a>, a satirical portrait of a white family living in Pretoria in post-apartheid South Africa. The story is a very personal one for Galgut, who grew up in Pretoria and witnessed late apartheid and its demise.</p>
<p>The novel follows the decline of four generations of the Swart family over 40 years and starts at the end of apartheid. It focuses on the pledge made by a dying family member to bequeath the family’s property to their black domestic worker. This promise goes ignored by future generations of the family. And it becomes an allegory for the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149262">broken promises</a> made to black South Africans at the dawn of the country’s non-racial democracy in 1994. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1455993213102305280"}"></div></p>
<p>As an academic who has focused on <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719083204/">South African society and history</a>, I first came across a photo of Galgut when I was researching the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/end-conscription-campaign-ecc">End Conscription Campaign</a> – a <a href="https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/9y94y/shades-of-white-complicity-the-end-conscription-campaign-and-the-politics-of-white-liberal-ignorance-in-south-africe">white anti-apartheid movement</a> formed in 1983 that aimed to abolish compulsory military service. </p>
<p>Like all white men at the time, Galgut was legally obliged to serve for two years in the South African army enforcing apartheid rule. Galgut was featured as “National Serviceman of the Month” in a 1983 edition of the apartheid military’s propaganda magazine, Paratus. This is a broader subject he has explored in his 1991 novel, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/beautiful-screaming-pigs/9781415209875">The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs</a>.</p>
<h2>A troubled history</h2>
<p>The majority of white South Africans are descended from Dutch settlers and <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-an-oppressors-language-reclaiming-the-hidden-history-of-afrikaans-71838#:%7E:text=Afrikaans%20is%20a%20creole%20language,indigenous%20Khoekhoe%20and%20San%20languages.">speak Afrikaans</a>. During apartheid, racial separation was legally enforced and many white people saw themselves as a superior race. Whites were given the best jobs and education – creating a <a href="https://theconversation.com/white-people-in-south-africa-still-hold-the-lions-share-of-all-forms-of-capital-75510">wealthy white elite</a>. After a lengthy Liberation Struggle with widespread protests and leading to a violent State of Emergency in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and negotiations began. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.anc1912.org.za/">African National Congress</a> has been in power in South Africa ever since the election of <a href="https://theconversation.com/mandela-in-south-africa-death-and-politics-are-bedfellows-21301">Nelson Mandela</a> in 1994. But under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), the party badly let down the country – with a decade of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-57758641">endemic corruption</a>. </p>
<p>Today, more than 25 years since the first democratic elections, white South Africans continue to <a href="https://theconversation.com/white-people-in-south-africa-still-hold-the-lions-share-of-all-forms-of-capital-75510">dominate the economy</a>, higher education and much of the media. And white South Africans continue to wield <a href="https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-mmusi-maimane-africa-south-africa-political-parties-6b76823b072aa940cef28249aec66928">significant political power</a>.</p>
<p>At the same time, many in the country’s white community <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/lens/examining-identity-race-and-responsibility-among-white-south-africans.html">have ignored</a> their role in ongoing racial inequality and are resistant to meaningful social, economic and political change. Large numbers of white families have emigrated or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/24/an-indictment-of-south-africa-whites-only-town-orania-is-booming">retreated</a> to <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1175370/johannesburgs-gated-communities-echo-apartheid-era-segregation-in-south-africa/">fortified luxury compounds</a> within the country – and continue to profit from systems of structural racism. It is maybe no surprise, then, that <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/transnational-white-supremacist-militancy-thriving-south-africa">white supremacist movements</a> in South Africa are thriving.</p>
<h2>White resistance</h2>
<p>As I discovered in my <a href="https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/9y94y/shades-of-white-complicity-the-end-conscription-campaign-and-the-politics-of-white-liberal-ignorance-in-south-africa">research</a>, many white liberals who once opposed apartheid have become reactionary critics in the new South Africa.</p>
<p>Politician and former journalist, <a href="https://twitter.com/helenzille?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Helen Zille</a>, for example, who served as the national leader (2007–2015) of the Democratic Alliance – South Africa’s official opposition party – has gone from being a liberal anti-apartheid and anti-conscription campaigner in the 1980s, to controversially describing South Africa as <a href="https://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/421599/zille-slammed-for-insulting-opinion-piece-on-zuma-democracy-and-african-cultures">‘a modern constitutional democracy’, imposed, ‘on what is largely a traditional, African feudal society’</a> and reproducing culture war discourses for a South African audience in her latest book <a href="https://mg.co.za/friday/2021-05-22-pope-zille-speaks-her-truth-go-woke-stay-broke/">#Stay Woke: Go Broke</a>.</p>
<p>Despite Zille, who is also the former mayor of Cape Town and premier of the Western Cape, being <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/29/south-africa-racism-row-twitter">publicly called out</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-40143710">suspended</a> and investigated by her own party for numerous <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/news/helen-zille-defends-colonialism-tweets-again-20784079">tweets</a> that defended colonialism, claiming it was “not all bad”, she remains the party’s Federal Chairperson and played a leading role in the recent provincial and municipal elections. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Farm land and a sunset." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aerial view of farmland east of Pretoria, South Africa, where the novel is set.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/aerial-view-farm-land-east-pretoria-1592212840">Salt Rock Digital/Shutterstock</a></span>
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</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1070289X.2012.672840">Research</a> has also found that many white people who lived through apartheid <a href="http://www.brandonhamber.com/publications/Journal%20A%20State%20of%20Denial.pdf">minimise</a> the suffering and racism of the time. It has even been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba3E-Ha5Efc">claimed by some</a> that white “<a href="https://www.accord.org.za/ajcr-issues/farm-attacks-or-white-genocide-interrogating-the-unresolved-land-question-in-south-africa/">suffering</a>” post-apartheid could be <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/myth-white-genocide">worse than</a> the experiences of black people during apartheid. </p>
<p>But while racism is still deeply embedded, with South Africa’s simmering social and class divisions <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211024072">continuing to play out</a>, there are some signs of <a href="https://theworld.org/stories/2020-06-11/what-south-africa-can-teach-us-racial-justice-and-reconciliation">racial reconciliation</a>. Just as during the traumatic years of apartheid, intelligent and humane cultural critics, artists, academics and activists, continue to be deeply committed to achieving meaningful change. </p>
<p>Indeed, with the success of The Promise, Damon Galgut joins a distinguished line of South African authors. Those such as <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/author/herman-charles-bosman/2821961">Herman Charles Bosman</a>, <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/andre-brink">Andre Brink</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/facts/">Nadine Gordimer</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/biographical/">JM Coetzee</a>, all of whom grappled with the complex dynamics of the country’s white community in their writing. And in this way, Galgut’s Booker win serves a crucial purpose in illuminating, questioning and exploring the country’s continued difficult journey to a better future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171255/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Conway has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy. </span></em></p>Damon Galgut joins a distinguished line of South African authors, who are grappling with the complex dynamics of the country’s white community in their writing.Daniel Conway, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies, University of WestminsterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1674742021-09-08T11:20:25Z2021-09-08T11:20:25ZWhy we still need the Women’s Prize for Fiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420010/original/file-20210908-21-130simi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What makes a winning book?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/features/news/revealing-the-2021-womens-prize-longlist">Women's Prize for Fiction</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every year since 1996, one of the most heralded of awards for women writing in English is announced annually. The prize formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Orange Broadband Prize, and Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, has – since 2018 – been anonymously supported by a “family” of sponsors, and known simply as the <a href="https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/">Women’s Prize for Fiction</a>. And the 2021 winner is <a href="https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/features/news/announcing-the-2021-winner-of-the-womens-prize">Susanna Clarke</a>, with her second novel Piranesi. </p>
<p>Clarke’s latest book was described by this year’s chair of judges and former Booker winner, <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-with-two-winners-its-a-double-edged-victory-perhaps-bernardine-evaristo-needed-the-recognition-more-125328">Bernardine Evaristo</a>, as a book that “would have a lasting impact”. It comes 17 years after Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which blends historical fiction with imaginative fantasy.</p>
<p>Every year, there is <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-we-really-still-need-a-women-s-prize-for-fiction-">some discussion</a> in parts of the press, and on social media, on the point of a prize for women writers. After all, the argument goes, Anglophone women writers have won such awards as the Booker – Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, for example, while many of those shortlisted are also women. Meanwhile, Doris Lessing and Alice Munro have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Do we need an award specifically for women? </p>
<p>Ever since the prize was first mooted in the early 1990s, many <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/james-marriott-brought-to-book/">have wondered</a> whether the prize is necessary, patronising, or even fair. A common position amongst its detractors is that the prize is sexist and discriminatory. English journalist and novelist, Auberon Waugh, (the eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh) famously called it <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4252011/Why-the-Orange-prize-is-a-lemon.html">the Lemon Prize</a>. </p>
<p>These debates about women writers have their origin, however, in the longstanding concerns and debates about the relationship between women, reading and writing: debates which are nearly as old as the history of the novel in English. </p>
<h2>The dismissal of women writers</h2>
<p>For example, the poet and priest Thomas Gisborne’s 1797 <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/conduct-book-for-women">conduct manual</a>, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, recommends to every woman “the habit of regularly allotting to improving books a portion of each day”. But Gisborne does not include novels among his “improving books” – like many of those <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Who-Read-Are-Dangerous/dp/1858944651">who have written</a> on the possible dangers of reading fiction for women.</p>
<p>This policing of the woman reader – and it is a short skip and jump here to the <a href="https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/">woman writer</a> – is far from an isolated occurrence. In January 1855, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne <a href="https://omeka.uvu.edu/exhibits/show/scribblingwomen/menu/">wrote to</a> his publisher that, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash – and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed”. Hawthorne was concerned with the subject matter of women writers – quite simply, it was not to his taste. </p>
<p>This dismissal of women writers continues today. In an interview at the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/06/vs-naipauls-declaring-them-inferior-men/351442/">Royal Geographic Society in 2011</a>, the British writer, V.S. Naipaul, was asked if he considers any woman writer his match, to which he replied “I don’t think so”. He claimed that he could “read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not”. Naipaul was clear that part of this recognition was because writing by women is “unequal” to him and his writing. Key to this is that the subject matter of women’s writing is often perceived as frivolous and unimportant. </p>
<h2>Separation and segregation</h2>
<p>This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not. The Women’s Prize for Fiction <a href="https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/faqs">was set up</a> in response to the Booker Prize of 1991 when none of the six shortlisted books were by women, despite 60% of the novels published that year by women writers. </p>
<p>Not all potential entrants welcomed the new prize. A.S. Byatt (winner of the 1990 Man Booker Prize) refused to have her fiction <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-s-byatt-denounces-sexist-orange-prize-d3wpcjwtql7">submitted for consideration</a> for the new award, and trivialised the Women’s Prize for the assumption that there is something that might be grouped together as a “feminine subject matter”. But it is an indisputable fact that women have often been excluded from or dismissed by the literary establishment, by reviewers, and by the prize system. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman sitting in book store reading books." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Being shortlisted makes a significant difference to the profile and sales of an author’s work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/">Pexels</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is not to say all women’s writing experiences are the same. There are challenges to the notion of awards for women’s writing – since they can still discriminate against different races, <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/open-letter-urges-womens-prize-and-gh-abandon-age-criteria-womens-writers-scheme-1275801">ages</a>, types of education, classes, disability and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/07/womens-prize-condemns-online-attack-on-trans-nominee-torrey-peters-detransition-baby">trans women</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/noentry_arts?lang=en">among others</a>. But what cannot be disputed is that all women (writers or not) are united by living in global and local societies that value, promulgate and prioritise the voice, identities and experiences of men over women. </p>
<p>The positions offered by Gisborne, Hawthorne and Naipaul are indicative of the expectations placed upon women in the literary marketplace and are very much tied to issues around the relationship between worth, taste and power. Who decides what text has “worth”, and how this worth has been arrived at, are questions that we might think are something for English literature students to grapple with at university. </p>
<p>But these are important questions for us all to consider. The humanities is broadly the study of what it is to be human and reading is a key marker of being human. We tell stories to ourselves, about ourselves, over and over again. We have entire industries built on reading, and on storytelling (whether books, films, games or more). We all need to think about who reads, and whose stories are told and re-told. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one way of ensuring that women’s stories are among those that are told and re-told.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167474/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stacy Gillis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not.Stacy Gillis, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1638762021-07-07T15:04:17Z2021-07-07T15:04:17ZNew Kiswahili science fiction award charts a path for African languages<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409866/original/file-20210706-21-17nf4h6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The 6th edition of <a href="https://kiswahiliprize.cornell.edu/">The Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature</a>, suspended last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is back. Founded in 2014, the prize recognises writing in African languages and encourages translation from, between and into African languages. Kiswahili is widely spoken across the east coast of Africa. This year’s prize also offers a special award designed to promote and popularise a Kiswahili vocabulary for technology and digital rights. We spoke to the prize founders – literary academic Lizzy Attree, also of <a href="http://shortstorydayafrica.org">Short Story Day Africa</a>, and literature professor and celebrated <a href="http://www.mukomawangugi.com/books.html">author</a> Mukoma Wa Ngugi – on the challenges of growing literature in African languages.</em></p>
<h2>What’s the idea behind the special Nyabola prize?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> The <a href="https://kiswahiliprize.cornell.edu/special-prize-for-2021/">Nyabola prize</a> gives us the opportunity to work in a new area that is really exciting for us. <a href="https://www.nanjalawrites.com">Nanjala Nyabola</a>, the Kenyan writer and activist, approached us with the idea and the funding to target vocabulary for technology and digital rights. This was particularly interesting to us for two reasons. Firstly, we have long wanted to offer a short story prize, but have stuck with longer works because of the opportunity it gives us to focus on <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Swahili-language">Kiswahili</a> literature as a fully mastered form. But we are aware that a short story prize is a good place to start for those who are only beginning to write. Secondly, Kiswahili is often considered to be steeped in archaic, or historically poetic technical words and forms. These must be updated to accommodate the modern language of science and technology. It has been an interesting adventure to find out which words can be adapted or amended to fit with modern digital and technological advancement.</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> There is also the idea that African languages are social languages, emotive and cannot carry science. Most definitely not true. All languages can convey the most complex ideas but we have to let them. There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.</p>
<h2>Mukoma, you also write speculative fiction; what is its power?</h2>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> At the height of dictatorship in Kenya under president <a href="https://theconversation.com/daniel-arap-moi-the-making-of-a-kenyan-big-man-127177">Daniel arap Moi</a>, when writers and intellectuals were being <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4186808">detained and exiled</a>, and their books <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/02/13/in-kenya-animal-farm-corralled/136feeb9-6d5b-421a-a6a2-72072e15e8ff/">banned</a>, it was the genre writers who kept the politics alive. In fact I dedicated my detective novel <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212059/nairobi-heat-by-mukoma-wa-ngugi/"><em>Nairobi Heat</em></a> to two such Kenyan writers, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/441171.David_G_Maillu">David Mailu</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Meja-Mwangi">Meja Mwangi</a>. We inherited a hierarchy of what counts as serious literature from colonialism, the division between minor and major literatures. It is important for us to blur the lines between literary and genre fiction – they are both doing serious work but in different styles. And the same goes between written literature and orature (spoken literature). Orature is seen lesser-than but, as writers and scholars have <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820568">argued</a>, orature has its own discipline and aesthetics.</p>
<h2>How has African language publishing changed since the prize began?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> Sadly I don’t think African language publishing has advanced very much in the last seven years or that there are enough academic studies focusing on this area. The demise of the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/award/show/5194-noma-award-for-publishing-in-africa">Noma Award</a> for Publishing in Africa was part of the decline, or indicative of it. However, book festivals are <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1684458/the-rise-of-literary-festivals-in-african-cities-lagos-hargeysa/">growing</a>, and we hope that in time this will lead to more awards and more publishing in African languages. Mukoma’s father, <a href="https://theconversation.com/tipped-to-win-nobel-literature-prize-kenyas-ngugi-misses-out-again-67009">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o</a>, is a pioneer in this area, and it’s been wonderful to see his novel shortlisted for the International Booker Prize recently. Although there are many other good examples of where changes are happening, considering the size of the continent and the number of languages, there is still a huge gap.</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> <a href="https://jaladaafrica.org/">Jalada Journal</a> is a good example of how attitudes to writing in African languages have changed for the better. In 2015 Jalada took a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/29/jalada-africa-short-story-ngugi-wa-thiongo-translated-over-30-languages-publication">short story</a> written by Ngugi in Gikuyu and self-translated into English and had it translated to close to 100 languages. This made it the most translated African short story. But the genius of their initiative was that most of the translations were between African languages. The Jalada example is important for two reasons – it shows that innovation can happen when African languages talk to each other. And that for the younger writers, African languages do not carry the same sense of inferiority – English is just another language. All in all I don’t think the Nyabola prize, for example, would have been possible 10 years ago. A lot has changed where it matters the most; the ideology around African languages is shifting.</p>
<h2>Do awards work and why are there so few major literary prizes in Africa?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> I think awards certainly work in raising the profile of writers and their work, but it is difficult to find funding for these kinds of projects.</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> It is all about setting up a viable and thriving literary ecosystem for writing in African languages. Literary agents, publishers, readership, critics, literary prizes and so on. Prizes are just one aspect. We realised that from the onset so our winners, in addition to the monetary awards, have also been published by <a href="https://mkukinanyota.com">Mkuki na Nyota Press</a> in Tanzania. We have been trying to get them translated into English but as Lizzy points out, funding is a huge problem. We were lucky to partner with Mabati Rolling Mills and the Safal Group. We have a de facto slogan: African philanthropy for African cultural development. But all the living parts of the African literary ecosystem have to be thriving. In this, we all have work to do.</p>
<h2>Why is African language literature so important?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> It’s been clearly demonstrated that learning in one’s mother tongue brings huge advantages to students. And where else must we find ourselves reflected if not in our own literature, in our own languages?</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> You can think of language as the sum total of a people’s history and knowledge. We store history and knowledge in language. To speak only English is to be alienated from your past, present and future. It is a pain we should all feel deeply. In my <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/9724578/rise_of_the_african_novel">book</a>, <em>The Rise of the African Novel: Language, Identity and Ownership</em>, I give the example of how early writing in South African languages remains outside our literary tradition. I talk about how that leads to truncated imaginations. We write within literary traditions, but what happens to your imagination when you cannot access your literary tradition?</p>
<p><em>The shortlist will be announced in October/November 2021, with the winners announced in Dar es Salaam in December 2021.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163876/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Associate Professor of literatures in English, Cornell UniversityLizzy Attree, Adjunct Professor, Richmond American International UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1271292019-12-01T14:17:16Z2019-12-01T14:17:16ZAfrican literary prizes are contested – but writers’ groups are reshaping them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303984/original/file-20191127-112539-ql1fr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C221%2C5422%2C2908&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Best-selling Nigerian novelist and literary superstar Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Armando Babani/EPA-EFE</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Literary prizes do more than offer recognition and cash to writers and help readers decide what book to choose. They shape the literary canon, a country’s body of highly regarded writing. They help shape what the future classics might be.</p>
<p>But what if Africa’s biggest prizes are awarded by foreign territories; former colonial masters? Or what if African-born writers in the diaspora are routinely chosen as winners over writers living and working in Africa? </p>
<p><a href="https://brittlepaper.com/2014/10/binyavanga-dear-caine-prize-rant-1/">Debates</a> have been <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2015-07-10-caine-prize-gets-the-sack">raging</a> over these issues in recent years, especially relating to the lucrative Caine Prize for African Writing.</p>
<p>The words ‘award’ or ‘prize’ imply that there was a selection process and the best emerged as winner. The awarding of value to a text through the literary prize industry involves selection and exclusion in which some texts and authors are foregrounded, becoming the canon. </p>
<p>The scholar <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QHkMIIIwukgC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=john+guillory&ots=CMGrrd-JrE&sig=Z4F-LeubDaFl0YmO9YUISZMaedc&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=john%20guillory&f=false">John Guillory</a> argues, in addition, for the need to</p>
<blockquote>
<p>reconstruct a historical picture of how literary works are produced, disseminated, reproduced, reread, and retaught over successive generations and eras. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The issues are complex and the landscape is changing. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02533952.2016.1158484">My research</a> covers how prizes create taste and canon – but also the increasing role played by literary organisations to shape those prizes and hence the canon. </p>
<p>Writers’ organisations mainly provide a social space for writers. There are dozens across the continent. Sometimes they include a publishing avenue, workshops, fellowships and competitions. In general, they have aimed to fill gaps left by mainstream literary bodies such as publishers, universities and schools, and book marketers.</p>
<p>To understand the process of creative writing on the African continent it’s useful to focus on the interrelationship between prize bodies and writers’ organisations in contemporary literary production.</p>
<h2>The Caine, the Commonwealth and writers’ organisations</h2>
<p><a href="http://caineprize.com/">The Caine Prize for African Writing</a> and <a href="http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/our-projects/the-short-story/">the Commonwealth Short Story Prize</a> are two major awards for contemporary Africa that have been cited as significant in promoting up-and-coming writers to become global writers. Both trade in the short story.</p>
<p>The Commonwealth, an initiative of the Commonwealth’s agency for civil society, awards unpublished fiction. The Caine, a charity set up in the name of the late literary organiser Sir Michael Caine, only accepts already published work. The cash reward that comes with winning these prizes is a major factor in their popularity on the continent.</p>
<p>But they are also significant in the growth of the short story genre. This is why I am interested in the partnerships that have emerged between prize bodies and writers’ organisations. Together they are influencing literary production structures from creative writing training to publishing and marketing texts. </p>
<p>Both the Caine and the Commonwealth prizes have partnered with African based writing organisations – like Uganda’s <a href="https://femrite.org/">FEMRITE</a> and Kenya’s <a href="http://www.kwani.org/">Kwani?</a> – to organise joint creative writing workshops. </p>
<p>The Caine holds annual workshops for its longlisted writers. These mostly take place in Africa, working with local writers’ organisations. Sometimes the resulting writing is entered into competitions and in this way, the prize body both produces and awards literary value. </p>
<p>Many of these writers’ organisations are headed by people who were canonised through the international prize, and sometimes the writing trainers and competition judges are also previous winners. </p>
<p>With such links it then becomes important to analyse the literary texts produced within these networks with the awareness of the importance of a text’s social, cultural and political context. The literary product becomes a reflection of the different systems of power at play.</p>
<h2>Power at play</h2>
<p>A good illustration of this power play can be found in best-selling Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story <a href="https://granta.com/jumping-monkey-hill">Jumping Monkey Hill</a>. It tells of a fictional creative writing programme for African writers run by the British Council. The story, set in South Africa, narrates the experiences of the writers, who are all expected to write about African realities in order to have their stories published internationally. The writers come to the workshop ready to learn how to improve their skills but encounter setbacks mainly because the trainer has a preconceived idea of what ‘plausible’ African stories should be. These writers have to understand the power play in place and then make a choice. </p>
<p>Jumping Monkey Hill acknowledges the role played by the creative writing institution in the production of literature as a commodity that must fit market demands. For this reason, the increasing investment of African based writers’ organisations in the literary production scene can also be understood as a political move. It is also an effort to influence the literature coming out of the continent and shape the canon. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303986/original/file-20191127-112545-10sckq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An advert for a workshop run by writers’ organisation Short Story Day Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">SSDA</span></span>
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<h2>Why writers’ organisations matter</h2>
<p>Contemporary African writers’ organisations are deliberately involved in canon formation by taking an active role in the production and distribution of literature. They understand that the uneven distribution of economic and cultural capital results in misrepresentations, or lack of representation, within the canon. </p>
<p>Writers’ organisations such as FEMRITE, Kwani?, <a href="https://farafinatrust.org/">Farafina</a>, <a href="http://writivism.com/">Writivism</a>, <a href="https://storymojaafrica.wordpress.com/about/">Storymoja</a> and <a href="http://shortstorydayafrica.org/">Short Story Day Africa</a>, among others, are active in the literary industry through publishing, creative writing programmes and providing access to major award organisations and international publishers. </p>
<p>They are, in the process, contributing to canon formation.</p>
<p>Short Story Day Africa, for instance, pegs its yearly competitions on the promise that the winning stories will be automatically submitted for the Caine Prize. In fact, the 2014 Caine winning story and one other shortlisted story were initially published in its anthology Feast, Famine and Potluck (2013). </p>
<p>In the African academy, creative writing is usually offered as a single course within a larger programme or is available only at selected universities. This has resulted in a market gap that has been quickly filled by writers’ organisations. They fill this gap by offering short term courses on various aspects of creative writing. This is in part because the local literary organisation possesses the cultural capital necessary to link writers to prize organisations and publishers, and therefore to global visibility.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127129/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Doseline Kiguru does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>African literary prizes are slowly becoming more relevant and richer, thanks to writers organising on the continent.Doseline Kiguru, Postdoctoral research fellow, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1050652018-10-17T08:39:10Z2018-10-17T08:39:10ZBooker Prize 2018: Anna Burns wins, but the big publishers are the real victors<p>In the literary world and among those for whom fiction is an interest beyond simply reading books, a great deal of attention will be given to the winner of 2018’s Man Booker Prize, Milkman, by Anna Burns. The chair of the judges, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, said Burns’ novel, about a young woman being sexually harassed by a menacing older man and set in Northern Ireland, “is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour”. </p>
<p>Of course, each year, following the announcement of the longlist in July, the shortlist in September and finally the winner in October, a discussion takes place as to what each announcement might mean. As the Man Booker is the most prestigious, remunerative and talked about literary prize in the UK, this “what does it mean?” can be made to reach into just about every crevice of contemporary culture. </p>
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<span class="caption">Anna Burns wins the 2018 Man Booker for Milkman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frank Augstein/PA</span></span>
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<p>This year has been no exception – discussion of the longlist was dominated by the inclusion of a graphic novel, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, and discussion of the shortlist by the presence or absence of millennial writers. Discussion of Milkman will no doubt be dominated by the history of Northern Ireland, by #MeToo and by the fact that Burns is the first UK-born winner for six years.</p>
<p>In these accounts, the significance of the prize is restricted to thinking about those novels that reach the long or shortlist or the one that is declared the final winner. But a range of work from various wings of literary studies over the past few years can help us to answer the question of what winning means in other, perhaps more challenging, ways.</p>
<h2>1. It’s a competition</h2>
<p>The underlying claim of <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435">James F. English’s pioneering 2009 work</a> in the sociology of literature, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value, is that both the power of and the problem with prizes consists in the way they equate “the artist with the boxer or discus thrower”. Prizes are competitions. </p>
<p>But while the publicity might go to the winning writers, the real winners are the publishers, who need not just the increased sales and chances of film and TV adaptations that are likely to follow, but also the less tangible boost to their authority and prestige given by a prize. The real winners are also more likely to be not just any publishers, but those that have already been successful. As the novelist Joanna Walsh, among others, <a href="http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/26/prizes-are-political-a-conversation-about-literary-prize-giving">has noted</a>, the Man Booker rules make submissions from small publishers very tricky because of the size of the print run required and the amount of money that involves. Because of this, a win can be a <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/insight/eyes-prize-booker-bounce-vs-spend-41677">drain rather than a boost</a>, and costs can outstrip sales if you don’t win. </p>
<h2>2. A competition that maintains a monopoly</h2>
<p>It’s not just that the competition is hard for small presses to enter – the big publishers have an near monopoly. In the 50 years that the prize has existed, literary publishing in English has been transformed from being made up of numerous independent companies, often family run, to being almost entirely dominated by the “big five”. These are Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. And, further, each of these is itself owned by a multinational media conglomerate. </p>
<p>As the sociologist <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/310390/merchants-of-culture-by-john-b-thompson/9780452297722/">John Thompson noted</a> in his book, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, the economies of scale made possible through mergers and acquisitions have created this almost complete monopoly. But through publishing via supposedly “separate” imprints, the big five have maintained an aura of smallness which is more conducive to the “creativity” on which their profits are ostensibly based. </p>
<p>Over the past 20 years, while 12 different publishers appear to have published the novels which were awarded the Prize, six of these wins were for imprints belonging to Penguin Random House. This monopoly is maintained through the prize’s <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/news/submissions-guidelines-man-booker-prize-fiction">rules for submissions</a> – the number of novels a publisher can submit is directly tied to the number of longlisted novels they have had over the past few years. An imprint already marked as prestigious is more likely to win again.</p>
<h2>3. It maintains a certain model of publishing</h2>
<p>In his <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-abstract/77/3/447/19918/Everything-and-LessFiction-in-the-Age-of-Amazon?redirectedFrom=fulltext">article about Amazon</a> and its relation to contemporary literary fiction, US literary scholar Mark McGurl suggests the extent to which reading of material normally scorned by the literary critic can deliver new insights.</p>
<p>And close reading of the Man Booker’s rules of eligibility – while perhaps dry in comparison to reading the winner on the bus or with a reading group – is also revealing. It shows that it is not just a competition for a small number of large publishers, but that the prize is largely about the maintenance of a certain idea of publishing, too. </p>
<p>The rules of eligibility are almost entirely now about the publisher, rather than the novel or novelist – and key to them is the exclusion of anything with a whiff of self-publishing about it. In order to be eligible, a publisher has to prove that they are based in the UK or Ireland, but the only way of proving this is by having the accoutrements of the conventional publisher. Eligible submissions must come from publishers with ISBNs and head offices who use retail outlets for print books and who publish at least two literary novels a year. <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/submissions">Rule 1g</a>, through its strange, uncomfortable tautology, betrays something of just what is at stake in this: “Self-published novels are not eligible where the author is the publisher.”</p>
<p>What the various methods of literary studies can suggest, then, is that, contrary to nearly everything written elsewhere about the Man Booker Prize, it arguably doesn’t really matter which novel wins. Whichever wins, I’d suggest that the real winner is an intensely conventional notion of publishing. It’s an idea of publishing where sales and prestige are the most important consequences of winning prizes and where a few very large publishers dominate. </p>
<p>And, to continue that domination, the most novel uses of contemporary technology, which can open up spaces for the most innovative aesthetic forms become illegitimate. If you want to see examples of this kind of work, look to the recently published novel, <a href="https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/original/gaudy_bauble">Gaudy Bauble</a>, by Isabel Waidner (published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe) – a book of experimental writing published in an innovative way. Under the current rules, such novels could never gain the coverage and attention offered by the Booker. And that’s a great pity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105065/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leigh WIlson has received funding from Arts Council England for the Contemporary Small Press project.</span></em></p>Rules for the UK’s most prestigious and lucrative literary prize effectively mean it is dominated by big publishers.Leigh WIlson, Professor of English Literature, University of WestminsterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1018852018-08-22T20:04:55Z2018-08-22T20:04:55ZYour guide to the Miles Franklin shortlist: a kaleidoscopic portrait of a diverse nation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233005/original/file-20180822-149463-122d0xh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Miles Franklin authors with their novels, clockwise from top left: Felicity Castagna, Eva Hornung, Kim Scott, Michelle de Kretser, Catherine McKinnon and Gerald Murnane.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Perpetual/ Copyright Agency/ Martin Ollman/Timothy Hillier. Eva Hornung image: Noni Martin.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Miles Franklin award is famously for “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. That’s a very broad palette, yet for most of the award’s existence — 1957 to the present — it has recognised a rather narrow field of “Australian life”.</p>
<p>The 60 novels honoured to date include 42 written by 28 men, and 18 written by 14 women. Almost to a person, these winning authors are Anglo-Australian. While their narratives cover an impressive range of issues, topics, periods, structure and narrative voice, it is notable that in a country described by our prime minister as “the world’s most successful multicultural society”, the Miles Franklin seems to have remained a bastion of monoculture. </p>
<p>Until recently, that is. Women authors are appearing more frequently - on the shortlists and as prize winners - and the cultural and linguistic heritage of authors is similarly expanding. This year the mix of shortlist authors, and the content of their novels, is impressively diverse.</p>
<h2>Border Districts</h2>
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<p>Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts is explicitly a literary novel, one with no overt plot and really only one voice. The narrator is fastidious to the point of primness, narrow and self-absorbed: a fussy old man who drifts into Grandpa Simpson moments, telling stories that wander from point to point with no apparent destination. Yet this work is also a remarkable account of memory, its fractures, and its fragments. This gives the lie to the narrator’s insistence that he is writing a report, not a novel, and casts a gentle melancholy over the work. </p>
<p>The unnamed narrator seems to have lived a life at arms length, remaining encased in abstractions, neglecting to experience anything at first hand. What I found the most desolate image in the novel is his childhood collection of glass marbles. The material expression of his life’s effort to “recollect” and “preserve” his memories and moods, they are no more than tiny flashes of colour, frozen in their glass bubbles, seeing and saying nothing. </p>
<p>In his sense of colour, and his hankering for the clarity of memory, is the suggestion that he contains within himself another man, one who yearns to feel.</p>
<h2>No More Boats</h2>
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<p>Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats opens in 1967, the year Harold Holt disappeared and, through the magic of narration, incorporates in the opening pages what is yet to come: 2001, the Tampa crisis, the September 11 attacks. In these pages, Antonio, the protagonist, is both young Italian migrant, and the ageing man who has become the face of: “We will decide who comes to this country …” </p>
<p>He and Rose live in Parramatta, where young men like their son Francis are testing out models of masculinity; where young women like their daughter Clare are crafting lives beyond their parents’ oversight; a rich human zoo that provides the stage for a brilliantly observed and sensitively recounted novel illuminating the politics of identity, family, community and nation.</p>
<p>His family are forced to confront the public scandal of Antonio’s xenophobia, to understand why a migrant in a migrant community could be so thoroughly seduced by the violent logic of the hard right. There are no real answers, of course; but beyond the family’s distress and the community’s upheaval is the shadow of two centuries of Australia struggling against “too many boats”.</p>
<h2>The Last Garden</h2>
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<p>Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden is based in a South Australian religious community named – perhaps ironically – <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/dictionary/German/Wahrheit-wahrheit-noun-feminine-singular-nominative/6a00bbb696e848c2fbc221a65d3bd008">Wahrheit</a>. There is little truth here though, and easily as many secrets and violences as are found beyond Wahrheit’s boundaries. These are flushed out by the tragedy that opens the novel, where Matthias Orion, not-fully-committed member of the church, destroys everything he can reach on his property, and slaughters first his wife and then himself.</p>
<p>Their 15-year-old son Benedict arrives home from boarding school to discover this horror; and even as it breaks him, so too it marks the end of the community’s Nebelung, their mythical home. The novel is told through a careful interlacing of Benedict’s and the pastor’s perspectives. The latter fails miserably to care sufficiently for the deeply traumatised Benedict, who after all has become “part of the wound” the community finds itself suffering. </p>
<p>Left largely to himself, and to the horses that escaped his father’s murderous rampage, and to the fox that stands in for that angel of death, Benedict lives with, and like, the animals. In that living he finds a way to recover some sense of self, and to re-enter his community: though whether as messiah or as restored son is uncertain.</p>
<h2>The Life to Come</h2>
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<p>The Life to Come, Michelle de Kretser’s new novel – actually a discontinuous narrative in five sections – offers an insider-outsider view of contemporary Australian society through the shifting focalisations, points of view and voices that comprise the sections. The threads that weave it together are Pippa, a self-satisfied, hyper-performative, not-quite-good-enough novelist, and “real” novelist George Meshaw, who disdains her shallow conceits and her populist writing style. </p>
<p>Pippa is the more visible of the two. She spends much of the novel charming and then disappointing friends, and struggling under the burden of her mother-in-law’s condescension, while always firmly focused on herself. George appears principally through his novels – the last of which, along with Pippa’s last, are tossed in the bin by Pippa’s disenchanted neighbour, who had hoped to find warmth and meaning in these works, but found only words. </p>
<p>While the stories are set in Sydney and in Paris, with references also to Sri Lanka, the twin foci of this novel (for me, at least) are, first, an excoriating critique of Australian colonialist attitudes and politics, and next the burning realisation that – as one character observes – “The only life in which you play a leading role is your own”; we are all merely bit players in the lives of others.</p>
<h2>Storyland</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233014/original/file-20180822-149496-1eqkgxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland is also structured in five discrete sections, the transitions here being characterised by the pulsing of time, rather than the geographical shifts of de Kretser’s work. Storyland starts and ends in the Illawarra region, during the early days of colonisation, where the possibility of trust or friendship between the local Wadi Wadi people and the invading British is constantly thwarted. </p>
<p>The sections between swoop up through the 19th and 20th centuries to a post-apocalypse future, and then cascade down again. Key elements – a river, a cave, a clever man’s axe – appear in each time period, connective tissue that binds them together. Characters too reappear, individuals or their descendants struggling with colonial society and its mores, with missed opportunities for connection, with the collapse of the environment and human society. </p>
<p>I read this novel as a migrant, and as a person of European descent, so I am not well positioned to evaluate the merits of McKinnon’s use of Aboriginal language and representation of the Aboriginal characters, but for me they were both convincing and moving. Story is not politics, but in it we can find ways to review ourselves and our histories, and perhaps begin to find points of conciliation.</p>
<h2>Taboo</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233016/original/file-20180822-149466-blv4ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Taboo, by Kim Scott, is located squarely in the post-Apology present, when the Australian government can express regret for the Stolen Generations while maintaining the Northern Territory Intervention; and when Aboriginal communities across the country are building new ways to enter the future without deserting the past. </p>
<p>Focalised primarily through the young woman Tilly, daughter of an Aboriginal man who, toward the end of his life, realised the power of language to heal his community’s wounds, it follows the people of Kepalup and their establishment of a Peace Park to settle the ghosts of local Aboriginal people slaughtered by the ancestors of local pastoralists. </p>
<p>Though the novel is necessarily tragic – killings, stolen children, wrecked lives – it also has something generous and pragmatic at its heart. Says Uncle Wilfred of the white community: “Sorry for the history, they say. Know it’s our country, our ancestral country. They’re not gunna give the land back, but know we’re the right people.” </p>
<p>Despite the record of massacre, despite the clumsy interventions by white people – well-meaning but condescending, unaware of how little they know of Noongar culture – the community turns to recovering their language, retelling stories, reclaiming culture, and finding “magic in an empirical age”.</p>
<p>These six novels convincingly meet the criteria of the Miles Franklin, providing accounts of Australian life in all its phrases, in stories of “the highest literary merit” that craft a kaleidoscopic portrait of this society.</p>
<p><em>The winner of the Miles Franklin will be announced at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Sunday 26th August from 4pm at Deakin Edge, Fed Square.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101885/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>For many years, the Miles Franklin award was a bastion of monoculture. But this year’s stories are a diverse reflection of Australia.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/994652018-07-06T13:26:08Z2018-07-06T13:26:08ZGolden prize: which Booker-winning novel is the best of them all?<p>The Booker Prize has been Britain’s most influential award since its inception in 1969. Following its original <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/fiction/history">mission statement</a> of awarding a prize to “the best novel in the opinion of the judges”, the prize has created headlines and controversy over five decades, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-reform-heralds-a-cultural-revolution-for-2014-19254">argument</a> over the inclusion of American authors after 2014. But it has also, and surely most importantly, rewarded writers, brought them to increasing public attention, and ensured them both critical acclaim and higher sales. </p>
<p>Past Booker winners are now on both school and university curricula, enriching the traditional canon of literature that all too often focuses on male, white and (upper) middle class writing that is no longer in keeping with the times. The prize has also spawned some important spin-offs, most prominently the Man Booker International Prize, first awarded in 2005 that has, over the past few years, evolved into a prize that awards both international writers and, uniquely, <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/international/history">their translators</a>.</p>
<p>In February 2017, following on from the success of previous special anniversary prizes, the Man Booker foundation launched the Golden Man Booker Prize to celebrate the prize’s 50th anniversary. Rather than having to (re)read all 51 winners, the five appointed judges – writer Robert McCrum, poet Lemn Sissay, novelist Kamila Shamsie, broadcaster and writer Simon Mayo, and poet Hollie McNish – were each allocated one decade of prize winners and tasked with identifying what they thought was the outstanding winner of those particular years. The shortlist was announced at a special event at the Hay Festival on May 26. The winner of the Golden Booker will be announced on July 8. So who’s in the running?</p>
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<h2>1970s</h2>
<p>For Robert McCrum, the outstanding text of the 1970s winners was V S Naipaul’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/dec/21/lookingbackatthebookervs">In a Free State</a>. It tells the story of two British people, Bobby and Linda, travelling across an unnamed African country in the midst of an ethnic war that suggests the Uganda of the Idi Amin years. Despite their privileged position as members of the white colonial class, Bobby and Linda come to experience firsthand the escalating violence in the country. </p>
<p>McCrum, <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/free-state-by-0">in his summary</a> of why he chose the text, explained that it was: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Outstandingly the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the 1970s, a disturbing book about displaced people at the dangerous edge of a disrupted world that could have been written yesterday, a classic for all seasons. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>1980s</h2>
<p>Lemn Sissay chose Penelope Lively’s often overlooked 1987 winner <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/mar/19/booker-club-moon-tiger">Moon Tiger</a>, surprisingly ignoring Booker heavyweights such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List (1982) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989).</p>
<p>Moon Tiger tells the story of Claudia Hampton, who recounts her colourful life as she lies dying, covering much of the 20th century in the process. Hampton is a fascinating heroine: not quite likeable, yet immensely intriguing and fascinating, and it was this that was most remarkable <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/moon-tiger-by-0">for Sissay</a>.</p>
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<h2>1990s</h2>
<p>The 1990s novel that stood out for Shamsie was Michael Ondaatje’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/mar/04/booker-club-english-patient-ondaatje">The English Patient</a> (1992). Ondaatje shared the prize with Barry Unsworth’s slave narrative Sacred Hunger – one of only two cases of a divided jury in the prize’s history. Set in Florence at the end of World War II, the novel recounts the life of a badly burnt soldier, who relives his ill-fated love affair with the married Katherine Clifton for his three companions: the spy Caravaggio, who administers morphine to the patient; his nurse Hana; and the Sikh bomb disposal expert Kip. </p>
<p>Ondaatje’s novel, turned into an award-winning film starring Ralph Fiennes, has always been considered one of the most high-profile winners of the award. For Shamsie, this is <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/english-patient-by">entirely justified</a>: it is “that rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight.” </p>
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<h2>2000s</h2>
<p>Mayo’s outstanding winner was Hilary Mantel’s <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/wolf-hall-by-dame-hilary-mantel">Wolf Hall</a> of 2009, the first in a planned trilogy of Tudor novels. It charts the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII. Its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, making Mantel one of only three authors – alongside Peter Carey and J M Coetzee – and to date the only woman to have won the award twice.</p>
<p>The final instalment of the trilogy – The Mirror and the Light – is highly anticipated and scheduled for publication in 2019. What stood out <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/wolf-hall-by">for Mayo</a> in his choice was “its questioning of what England is” - a question that is, despite the novel’s historical setting, surely pertinent in the present.</p>
<h2>2010s</h2>
<p>It is the most recent Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders’ <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-saunderss-lincoln-in-the-bardo-is-a-genuinely-startling-novel-85917">Lincoln in the Bardo</a> of 2017, that was the most outstanding recent novel for McNish. The novel covers a single night, set in a graveyard where a grieving Abraham Lincoln mourns the death of his young son Willie. Featuring a plethora of diverse voices, Lincoln in the Bardo explores ideas of life, death and mourning in a way that, <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/lincoln-bardo-by-0">according to McNish</a>, was simultaneously “funny, imaginative and tragic” as well as “a piece of genius in its originality of form and structure”.</p>
<p>Narrowing down 51 Man Booker Prize winners from five decades to a shortlist of five is a herculean task. What makes this shortlist remarkable for me is its absence of the “big” winners, the ones that are most often associated with the prize: Ishiguro, Rushdie, Keneally, Coetzee, Martell. Maybe the judges tried to steer clear of them precisely because they have had so much coverage in the past.</p>
<p>2018’s shortlist is very varied – historical narratives, fictional biographies, explorations of war and genocide all feature. For the judges of each decade’s “best” winner, it was a very personal decision; as it will have been for the members of the public who have voted for their favourite of the five shortlisted texts.</p>
<p>What do I think will happen? I’m hesitant to say … but rather than truly judging “the best” of the Booker winners, perhaps 2018’s special award will reward that novel that still manages to best capture the public mood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99465/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christine Berberich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Booker Prize is 50 – and to celebrate it, there’s a mega prize.Christine Berberich, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of PortsmouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/859172017-10-18T14:19:53Z2017-10-18T14:19:53ZGeorge Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo is a genuinely startling novel<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190824/original/file-20171018-32382-1ndxsla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Man Booker</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I am someone who reads, teaches, and writes about contemporary American fiction for a living. Knowing this, you might expect that fresh, experimental novels would constantly be arriving on my desk, that I would be inundated with literary innovation.</p>
<p>But it is in fact rare to come across a book that does something genuinely new and startling with the form of the novel, a form with a long and distinguished history. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which last night won the 2017 <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/booker-prize-1686">Booker Prize</a>, is that rare kind of book. I had read all of Saunders’s short fiction collections, as well as a great many interviews and essays, before opening his first novel. Yet despite what should have been ideal preparation, I was unprepared for what I found there.</p>
<p>As any student of American history knows, the ostensible subject of Lincoln in the Bardo is the most revered of all US presidents. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/abraham-lincoln-15091">Abraham Lincoln</a> was an autodidact who rose to fame from an inauspicious backwoods upbringing. He became president at what remains the most fraught moment in American history. He led the north to victory in the Civil War, and abolished slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. He thought like a legal scholar but projected the empathy of a statesman. His speeches are among the greatest ever made by a politician. And he was assassinated as the war drew to a close, ensuring his legacy could not be tarnished by any future descent from the height of his powers.</p>
<p>Lincoln is also one of the most written about men in history, a subject of endless fascination. He has been explored by countless scholars, imagined by myriad writers, embodied by numerous actors on stage and screen. How then to write about Lincoln in a new way, to imagine not only the man himself but all he has come to represent in and for American culture?</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190825/original/file-20171018-32341-1lhsaaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Abraham Lincoln, 1863.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Lincoln_O-77_matte_collodion_print.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<h2>Tackling Lincoln</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review">Lincoln in the Bardo</a> answers this question in two surprising ways. First, Saunders does not focus his primary attention on Lincoln, but on the spirits who inhabit the cemetery in which his 11-year-old son Willie has been buried. Reading the novel’s opening line – “On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen” – we initially assume that we are hearing the voice of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps coming to us from the mysterious space of the bardo, the realm in Buddhist mythology that lies between death and rebirth.</p>
<p>It soon becomes clear, however, that the facts do not fit with this reading, and nor does the tone. On the third page, we discover that the speaker is one “hans vollman”, in conversation with someone called “roger bevins iii”. These are not famous men, nor are they taken up with famous acts. They are discussing the fatal accident experienced by vollmann when he was hit by a beam while in the first flush of sexual arousal with his virgin bride. Echoing the setting and tone of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language classic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/15/the-dirty-dust-cre-na-cille-mairtin-o-cadhain-review-alan-titley">Cré na Cille</a>, Lincoln in the Bardo begins like a bawdy black comedy.</p>
<p>In building a fictional world from this unexpected opening, the second key decision Saunders makes is to refuse to do what writers of historical fiction have always done, which is to conceal the sources of their research and imagine their subject fresh onto the page. Instead, Saunders quotes a wide range of scholarly passages verbatim, attributing the quotations to their author and text. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190826/original/file-20171018-32375-gyhkow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury</span></span>
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<p>These passages are drawn from what historians call primary sources (letters and memoirs from Lincoln’s contemporaries) and secondary sources (scholarly accounts of Lincoln in the 150+ years since his death). Most of these sources are real, some are invented, and it’s not always clear which is which. The result is a novel that powerfully transmits the cumulative and collective effort to write history, to do justice to the past and what it means.</p>
<h2>A democracy of contradictions</h2>
<p>The mix of these two registers – the comic and the scholarly – shouldn’t work, but it does. Once the reader has settled into the rhythm of alternating chapters dealing with the chaotic world of the spirits and the more sober (but sometimes equally peculiar) scholarship on Lincoln, Saunders’s project gains clarity, purpose and power. Populated with a multitude of voices, the novel addresses the great faultlines of American democracy – race, gender, wealth, sexuality – while keeping its eye firmly on the common ground its characters share in their inevitable confrontation with life and death.</p>
<p>In a creative writing masterclass with Saunders that I attended earlier this year at the University of Liverpool, the author outlined his vision of literary stories as “active systems of contradiction”. In mixing together what we usually think of as opposites – tragedy and comedy, high rhetoric and bawdy farce, private grief and political action, the individual and the collective – stories can challenge our sense that some things must be kept apart. We come to see that these apparent opposites are in fact different faces of a fundamental unity. This is the unity that underpins our connection to one another in a shared world.</p>
<p>In writing Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders couldn’t have known how directly his themes would speak to an America and a world in which contradictions are becoming increasingly stark and oppositions are being set in stone. The Booker Prize jury has done us a favour by drawing attention to a book that tries to forge a unity among opposites in the most surprising ways.</p>
<p>Despite its origins in grief and mourning, Saunders’s message is a refreshingly hopeful one. We can only hope the message is heard by those whose ears it needs to reach.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Kelly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Booker Prize jury has done us a favour by drawing attention to this book.Adam Kelly, Lecturer in American Literature, University of YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/836062017-09-13T10:04:10Z2017-09-13T10:04:10ZMan Booker: who decides what makes a good book, the experts or the readers?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185150/original/file-20170907-9573-xf0btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The announcement of the shortlist for the <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction">Man Booker Prize 2017</a> will certainly encourage many bookworms to catch up with a new set of “<a href="http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/man-booker-prize-2017">must reads</a>”. </p>
<p>This year’s list for the “<a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/news/man-booker-prize-2017-longlist-announced">leading prize for quality fiction in English</a>” includes three debut novelists, as well as previously shortlisted and winning authors. Being shortlisted can lead to a dramatic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/22/his-bloody-project-sales-booker-shortlist-graeme-macrae-burnet">increase in sales</a>. The winner, announced in October, can also look forward to a £50,000 prize as well as joining a canon which includes Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood. </p>
<p>Awards such as the Man Booker can offer a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/16/booker-prize-bad-for-writing-alternative-celebrate-literature">shortcut to the classics</a> of the future, readily assigned by a panel of people regarded as experts in the field. And for some readers, choosing books from an official selection like the Man Booker shortlist makes it easier to know that what they are reading is deemed “acceptable” by the literary elite. </p>
<p>This is not to say that’s the only reason people enjoy poring over such shortlists. But let’s not pretend that what other people think of what we read isn’t important to many of us. For some, this could even mean going so far as to disguise a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/11824405/E-book-readers-guilty-pleasures-revealed.html">guilty pleasure</a> by reading it on an e-reader – making it impossible to judge a book (or the reader) by its cover.</p>
<h2>Reading together</h2>
<p>Despite reading often being seen as something people do in a room of one’s own, in recent years there has been a big rise in the number of book groups and reading clubs, emphasising the social experience reading can bring. </p>
<p>The success of what researchers have called “<a href="http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/english/research/projects/beyond-the-book.aspx">mass reading events</a>”, like those led by Oprah Winfrey or <a href="http://www.richardandjudy.co.uk/home">Richard and Judy</a>, are testament to the power not only of recommendations from people whose opinions we value, but also of feeling that we’re reading the same things as lots of others. </p>
<p>Book groups have long fulfilled this social function of reading for their many members. Over a cup of tea or glass of wine, people share their thoughts about a book they have read (or at least intend to read), debate its merits and its flaws, and collectively explore what it means to them. </p>
<p>More recently, the proliferation of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/book-clubs-rebooted-emma-watson-florence-welch-and-the-best-new-online-reading-groups">online book groups</a> has also allowed space for readers to interact over their reading from further afield, often focused on specific genres, or with choices influenced or curated by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/book-clubs-rebooted-emma-watson-florence-welch-and-the-best-new-online-reading-groups">celebrities or vloggers</a>. </p>
<h2>Shared experience</h2>
<p>Through my own experience of being part of a community reading group, I have also seen how the act of reading itself is something that <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jaac/2015/00000007/00000003/art00004">brings people together</a>.</p>
<p>Shared reading groups have grown in popularity across the country in recent years. They have been an integral part of the work of the Liverpool based charity, <a href="http://www.thereader.org.uk/">The Reader</a>, which promotes the benefits of reading across different communities. In a range of venues including libraries, health centres, schools, and <a href="http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2017/may/using-poetry-to-bring-back-memories-for-people-with-dementia.aspx">care homes</a>, members of a shared reading group join together to listen to a story or a poem being read aloud, reading along with a copy of the text if they want to. Members join groups for lots of different reasons – not least because of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-reading-a-little-each-week-is-a-form-of-life-support-37445">impact reading can have on well-being</a>. </p>
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<span class="caption">Reading with friends.</span>
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<p>Not only do the members of a shared reading group physically meet to listen to the reading, but they also come together through talking about the story or the poem, listening and responding to each other’s interpretations, and working collaboratively to explore what it means to them.</p>
<p>These types of shared experiences are a powerful reminder that the meanings we make from a text are different every time it is read. In this way, reading groups bring people together in the active sharing of interpretation.</p>
<p>Those shared readings which are made in the moment sit alongside the “expert” readings of critics and judges as part of the richness of what literature represents to different people. And no doubt as the nights draw in, armed with a new shortlist of titles to get stuck into, reading groups up and down the country will be coming together to read and to work at making meanings of their own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83606/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The shortlist is out, but who wins? You decide.Susan Jones, Assistant Professor in English Education, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/832182017-09-06T13:03:38Z2017-09-06T13:03:38ZHeart-warming, biting, tragic, funny: the Miles Franklin shortlist will move you<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184828/original/file-20170906-9835-191vmdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Each of the five shortlisted authors for Australia's prestigious literary prize is a first-time nominee.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 2017 Miles Franklin Award winner will be announced tonight, but I’m not taking bets on who it’s likely to be. Each shortlisted novel is by a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/18/miles-franklin-award-shortlists-five-first-time-nominees">first-time nominee</a>. Each is of satisfyingly high literary quality and very different in voice, logic, focus and story.</p>
<p>But they do have one feature in common: each includes as a key character an author, or authors. I’m not sure I have ever read a shortlist where the protagonists of each volume shared an occupation. Of course all five include heartbreak, loss and death — that is, after all, <em>de rigueur</em> for literary fiction — but the focus on the lives and works of writers, and on narratives about narrative, presents as though the Australian literary community as one turned to look inward, and then wrote down what it saw. </p>
<p>We have a worn out, avant garde novelist (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28592593-the-last-days-of-ava-langdon">Last Days of Ava Langdon</a> by Mark O'Flynn); an ambulance-chasing journalist (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28452843-an-isolated-incident">An Isolated Incident</a> by Emily Maguire); “famous Australian writers” (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29848070-their-brilliant-careers?from_search=true">Their Brilliant Careers</a> by Ryan O'Neill); and academics in linguistics (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29912800-waiting?from_search=true">Waiting</a> by Philip Salom) and engineering (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31338918-extinctions?from_search=true">Extinctions</a> by Josephine Wilson).</p>
<h2>Art imitates life</h2>
<p>I started with Last Days of Ava Langdon, by poet and novelist Mark O’Flynn. This book, which channels the Australian-New Zealand writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Langley">Eve Langley</a>, opens with the rhythm and pulse of a prose poem: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sound of the sea slapping at the green and greasy legs of pier. The crashing of dishes. A cartoon whale. </p>
</blockquote>
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<p>This, on the very first page, sets the tone for the rest of the novel, one that vividly renders the glorious Blue Mountains environment (and its small towns with their country values), and the portrait of a writer who might have been, should have been, no longer is. </p>
<p>O’Flynn presents his Langley/Langdon as immensely sympathetic, and stunningly irritating. “All her life”, says the narrator, “has been the pursuit of the perfect line”. </p>
<p>While any writer must surely doff the cap to that pursuit, Ava’s single-mindedness has been more destructive than productive. She valiantly channels Oscar Wilde, refuses to acknowledge that she is ancient and frail, ignores the squalor of her home, and flickers between hope and hopelessness about her writing. She is a damaged person, <a href="http://www.theartstory.org/movement-dada.htm">a dada artist</a>. She has lost her family and friends and she dies alone. </p>
<p>Still, Ava’s imagination (to say nothing of her splendid dress sense) brings a degree of sentience to the world, casting it in a luminous light. O'Flynn’s novel brings to bear a cold but tender gaze on “the last days” of someone who, but for fortune, could have been an extraordinary Australian artist.</p>
<h2>Misfits in an unforgiving world</h2>
<p>Philip Salom, another poet, gives us Waiting. It relies on the skill of poetic diction and the narrative traction of strong characters, the “looking awry” that so often accompanies mental illness, and the urgency to connect, to find a safe haven in an unforgiving world. </p>
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<p>He juxtaposes together two pairs of difficult people to propel the narrative. The first two are Big (a cross-dressing, over-performing “crazy professor”) and his partner Little (quiet, crushed Agnes, the troubled lamb of god). They have effectively fallen out of history and are, Agnes reflects, “two characters in a novel who have no further story”. </p>
<p>The second pair, by contrast, are the inheritors of a further story: designer/landscaper Angus (coincidentally Agnes’ cousin) and the linguist Jasmin. They are creeping by fits and starts toward a relationship, but unlike Big and Little, who cling together for the most part in real intimacy, Jasmin and Angus struggle to connect, given their tendency to compete with each other, and their misunderstandings of each other’s values and professions. For Angus, the physical shaping of the material world is what matters. For Jasmin, it is the socio-political positioning of work that matters.</p>
<p>The novel is set against the increasingly threatening qualities of bushfire in the Australian environment, and the increasingly constrained options for those who do not or cannot fit into middle class conventions. The characters’ stories play out, to an end that promises consolation, at least.</p>
<h2>Not so isolated</h2>
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<p>With Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident, we leave the poets and misfits and return to the “real” world: small-town New South Wales, and the struggle to make a living, maintain an identity, and retain hope for the future. </p>
<p>Chris Rogers, a barmaid and some-time prostitute, is faced with the loss of her beloved younger sister Bella, whose body is found on the side of the road, raped and murdered. May Norman, an ambitious journalist, attaches herself to Chris to report on the story and the unfolding investigation. So far, so crime thriller.</p>
<p>But actually, this is more an analysis of mourning, woven through with a biting critique of the social and legal context in which, in Australia, one woman is murdered each week, on average, by someone close to her. At one point May reflects on yet another appalling story of such violence, and observes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This had nothing to do with what had happened to Bella and what happened to Bella had nothing to do with Tegan Miller and none of it had to do with the rich Sydney housewife left out to rot in the street which had nothing to do with the Nigerian girls stolen as sex slaves…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The unwavering attention paid to violence against women and to the commercial exploitation of suffering renders the title bitterly ironic: all these “isolated incidents” add up to a deeply felt and troubling novel.</p>
<h2>Extinctions of all kinds</h2>
<p>Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions is the winner of Dorothy Hewett Unpublished Manuscript prize, so has already made a significant mark on the literary landscape. It offers a tragic portrait of the various ways in which extinction looms — environmental, personal, cultural.</p>
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<p>We see the sorrows, indignities and regrets of old age, as viewed through the eyes of retired theoretical engineer Fred Lothian, who fills his home with designer furniture rather than with his family.</p>
<p>We see the heartbreak of a wasted life, in his brilliant son, Callum, who was left with acquired brain injury following a car accident. And we see the struggle for identity in his adopted daughter, Caroline, who researches species extinction and is disconnected from her own Indigenous heritage. Together, these stories present an overwhelming narrative of loss, failure and distress. </p>
<p>But there is the possibility of an alternative in the form of Fred’s neighbour Jan. Though like Fred and his family, she has suffered great loss, she brings a wonderful energy and resilience, and a refusal to resign herself to extinction. Instead, she presses Fred to start over, to find a more productive way to be.</p>
<h2>Literary satire</h2>
<p>Finally, we come to Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers, one of the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time. He sails close to the wind of defamation (were the original authors still alive), unmercifully lampooning the models for his “extraordinary Australian writers”. </p>
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<p>Like a supremely confident stand-up comic, he pushes the joke from initial humour through infuriating repetition to helpless laughter. And along the way, he shows impressive knowledge of Australian literary culture, so erudite readers can play the game of “spot the reference”. We see the sexism that runs through literary culture. We revisit <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/blog/a-lost-treasure-of-australian-letters-songs-of-the-kookaburra/">the poetry wars</a>— “a knife fight in a phone booth” — in the character of Arthur rhutrA, an author of whom it was said that: “the only constraint he couldn’t overcome was his lack of talent”. </p>
<p>We bump into parallel-universe versions of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley">Ern Malley</a>, Australia’s most infamous literary hoax, and radio characters <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad_and_Dave_from_Snake_Gully">Dad and Dave</a>. We meet the litigious Stratford, self-proclaimed original author of works plagiarised and made famous by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce.</p>
<p>We are confronted by the rightwing racist Edward Gayle (writer for the journal Quarter) and the communist Francis McVeigh, whose early memory of reading Marx’s Manifesto “terrified me so much I had nightmares for the next six months”. Literary giant after literary giant, publisher after publisher, is kneecapped by these excoriating and hilarious accounts of the players, their work, and the impossibly interwoven lives they lead.</p>
<h2>Compassionate voices</h2>
<p>There is a surprising degree of compassion in the narrative voice that relates each of these novels, even when they are also characterised by sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued commentary. The characters are damaged — as are most human beings — but (with the exception of some of O'Neill’s writers) they are rarely people of ill will.</p>
<p>The narrators, in each case, maintain the distance required of an objective observer, yet cannot help but record small acts of humanity, the struggle to manage, to be recognised and to recognise others. This makes them, as a group, the most heart-warming selection of shortlisted novels that I have read for some time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83218/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>There is a surprising degree of compassion in the narrative voices of this year’s five shortlisted novels. They are a heart-warming selection.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/641562016-10-20T19:16:51Z2016-10-20T19:16:51ZFriday essay: why literary celebrity is a double-edged sword<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142285/original/image-20161019-20333-u5msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A wax model of Ernest Hemingway at Madame Tussauds in New York.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anton_Ivanov/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1967, French theorist Roland Barthes famously <a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/barthes.death.pdf">declared</a> the metaphorical “death of the author” in his essay of the same name. Barthes rejected the Romantic idea of the author as a unique figure of genius. Still, despite his best efforts, this romantic notion of the heroic, solitary wordsmith lives on today. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1319.html">Medieval times</a>, authors were seen as nothing more than craftsmen. But the Romantic poets – Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley – singled out the writer as a figure of “spontaneous creativity”. As academic Clara Tuite <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/210888">has noted</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Romantic period saw the birth of the literary celebrity, a figure distinguishable from the merely famous author by his or her status as a cultural commodity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Romantic writer was seen as either a solitary hero, a tragic artist, a melancholy genius - or all three. In the centuries since, famous authors have been both celebrated and panned, adored and ridiculed. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lord Byron (1788-1824), engraved by H.Robinson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Georgios Kollidas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since Romantic times, we have often expected writers to be detached from the trappings of celebrity culture, aligning their integrity with an anti-commercial attitude. There is, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Star_Authors.html?id=QFcqYIHCfgAC">argues author Joe Moran</a>, a “nostalgia for some kind of transcendent, anti-economic, creative element in a secular, debased, commercialised culture” that we commonly attach to writers.
Indeed theorist Lorraine York <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Literary_Celebrity_in_Canada.html?id=_5HhaFex8BsC&redir_esc=y">has asked</a> if we can even use words like “fame” and “celebrity” to describe writers, “those notorious privacy-seeking, solitary scribblers”. </p>
<p>One of the first to question the idea of literary celebrity was the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who found his own fame something of a burden.
More recently, authors such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers have struggled with the desire for popularity and credibility. In today’s internet culture, reaction to a famous writer’s actions or utterances is quick and merciless. Next week, a new author will be thrust into the media spotlight, with the announcement of <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction">the Booker Prize winner</a>. </p>
<p>Yet interestingly, discussions about the difficulties of being a famous writer rarely include women. The notion of the solitary genius is usually attached to men. A notable exception is the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante – who is famous, ironically, precisely because of her reluctance to engage with literary celebrity. Ferrante writes under a pseudonym, in her words, to “liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety”. </p>
<p>Ferrante’s recent unmasking by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/03/elena-ferrante-anita-raja-unmasking-publisher-outing-my-brilliant-friend">a literary journalist</a> has unleashed a torrent of condemnation. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"784869671145054208"}"></div></p>
<p>The extent to which her true identity has been picked over shows how our society craves constant closure, often at the expense of creativity and imagination. As Michel Foucault once <a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf">noted</a>, literary anonymity is “of interest only as a puzzle to be solved”. </p>
<p>Such is the nature of contemporary celebrity culture that many cannot tolerate the idea of writers who prefer anonymity over fame. So those such as Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and Ferrante, who have evaded the limelight, have been scrutinised as much for their personal lives as their actual works. </p>
<h2>A short history of famous (male) writers</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Russian stamp showing Charles Dickens on his 150th birth anniversary.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Olga Popova / Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 19th century writers Charles Dickens (hero of the working class) and Mark Twain (America’s most beloved humourist), were plagued with aspects of their fame. While Dickens was often criticised for appealing to the lower classes, Twain <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/Celebrity.html">likened</a> celebrities to clowns. Celebrity, he said, “is what a boy or a youth longs for more than for any other thing. He would be a clown in a circus […] he would sell himself to Satan, in order to attract attention and be talked about and envied”.</p>
<p>Yet Dickens and Twain also enjoyed their fame. Dickens was renowned for engaging his audiences at public lectures; Twain also went on speaking tours. </p>
<p>If we fast forward half a century or so, we come to Ernest Hemingway – another author who felt imprisoned by his fame. As theorist Leo Braudy <a href="http://leobraudy.com/the-frenzy-of-renown-fame-and-its-history/">puts it</a>, Hemingway was caught between “his genius and its publicity”. In an undated writing fragment, Hemingway <a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Glow-in-the-dark+authors%3A%22+Hemingway's+celebrity+and+legacy+in+under...-a0246955529">wrote</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have reached the point where we are ruled by photographers and agents of publishers and writing is no longer of any importance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also called fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald a “hack” for writing Hollywood screenplays.</p>
<p>Yet Hemingway nevertheless helped promote the “Hemingway myth”, built around ideals of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7096913-all-man">masculinity</a> and genius. He was frequently photographed outdoors, fishing and hunting, or attending bullfights. </p>
<p>Then there was Norman Mailer, the pugnacious, Jewish author of The Naked and the Dead and Advertisements for Myself. In 1960, Mailer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/arts/adele-mailer-artist-who-married-norman-mailer-dies-at-90.html?_r=0">stabbed and seriously wounded his then-wife, Adele Morales</a> with a pen-knife at a drunken party. (After pleading guilty to a charge of third-degree assault, he received a suspended sentence.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Norman Mailer receives an Austrian decoration for science and art in 2002.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leonard Foeger/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mailer cultivated a public persona that certainly boosted his fame, but did little for his literary reputation. Many critics accused him of wasting his talents by shamelessly promoting himself; he did frequent TV interviews, including a particularly notorious <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw">appearance</a> on The Dick Cavett Show, where he and Gore Vidal famously butted heads over Mailer’s public profile and ego. </p>
<p>Indeed, Mailer once <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005907&content=reviews">called himself</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Theorist John Cawelti suggests that unlike Hemingway, who lived out to the end an ambiguous conflict between celebrity and art, Mailer “tried to make his public performances themselves into a kind of artistic exploration”. Mailer frequently wrote about himself in the third-person, in an effort to “perform” himself as a character. </p>
<p>Interestingly, at the same time as all this was happening, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/jd-salinger-9470070">J.D. Salinger</a>, author of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye">The Catcher in the Rye</a>, famously was living as a recluse. </p>
<h2>Franzen and Oprah</h2>
<p>In 2001, Oprah Winfrey put Jonathan Franzen’s sprawling family saga <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3805.The_Corrections?from_search=true">The Corrections</a> on her <a href="https://static.oprah.com/images/o2/201608/201608-obc-complete-list-01a.pdf">book club list</a>, encouraging her audience to read it. Franzen was invited onto Oprah’s show. He declined, <a href="http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/jonathan-franzen-uncorrected/">saying</a> he didn’t want his novel placed alongside “schmaltzy, one-dimensional [books]”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wolf Gang/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Franzen was widely panned for being a snob. Andre Dubus III, for instance, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/29/books/oprah-gaffe-by-franzen-draws-ire-and-sales.html?pagewanted=all">criticised</a> Franzen’s assumption that “high art is not for the masses, that they won’t understand it and don’t deserve it”. </p>
<p>Media scholar Ian Collinson <a href="https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/everyday-readers-reading-popular-culture-ian-collinson/">sees</a> Franzen’s reaction as a symbolic attempt to separate the television celebrity from the novel, an act of “cultural decontamination”. Franzen, he writes, feared his position within the high-art tradition “would be compromised if his novel were subject to such blatant commercialism”.</p>
<p>Yet nine years later, Franzen <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/16/oprah-winfrey-jonathan-franzen-freedom">apologised</a> to Oprah. He was again invited onto her show, this time to promote his 2010 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7905092-freedom">Freedom</a>. He did not refuse a second time. Ironically, many criticised Franzen for succumbing to the allure of popularity. The old assumptions regarding the incompatibility of literature and celebrity resurfaced, with one critic, Macy Halford, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/franzen-meets-oprah">suggesting</a> that “Oprah and Franzen are not terribly compatible personalities”. </p>
<p>This whole saga attests to what Tessa Roynon <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/cambridge-introduction-toni-morrison-1">has called</a> the “damned if you don’t, damned if you do” mentality of literary celebrity. Authors are often seen as having to choose between respectability amongst fewer critics, or widespread popularity at the expense of their reputations. (<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/06/literary-celebrity">One article</a> about a speech Franzen gave to students in 2011 was memorably titled, “Touching the hem of Mr Franzen’s garment.”)
Like Mailer, Franzen’s career has been marred by the troubled union between mass media presence and desire for literary acceptance. </p>
<h2>Celebrity and Sincerity: Wallace and Eggers</h2>
<p>One of Franzen’s peers, the late David Foster Wallace, was an author in the Romantic mould; he is associated with the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/sincerity-not-irony-is-our-ages-ethos/265466/">“New Sincerity”</a> literary movement, and his 1996 novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest?from_search=true">Infinite Jest</a> has been judged by many as a work of genius. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A hand-drawn tribute to David Foster Wallace.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Steve Rhodes/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2008, Wallace took his own life. Before his death, Wallace was known to have suffered from depression, and he projected an image of the melancholy genius. His opinion of celebrity was less than favourable. His widow Karen Green once <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview">noted</a> in an interview that all of the media attention given to Wallace “turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince”.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/reviews/wallace-v-profile.html">1996 New York Times piece</a>, Wallace claimed that the “hoopla” of celebrity made him want to become a recluse. The cult of celebrity was something he consistently mocked in his work, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/365145-the-paradoxical-intercourse-of-audience-and-celebrity-the-suppressed-awareness-that">calling</a> celebrities “symbols of themselves” rather than real people. As with Rousseau and Salinger, the logic went that Wallace “deserved his celebrity”, journalist Megan Garber <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/david-foster-wallace-the-end-of-the-tour/400928/">writes</a>, specifically because he had not sought it.</p>
<p>Dave Eggers is also part of the “New Sincerity” movement. A writer of serious, sentimental fiction, his books include his debut memoir <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4953.A_Heartbreaking_Work_of_Staggering_Genius?from_search=true">A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</a>, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4952.What_Is_the_What?from_search=true">What is the What?</a>, the fictionalised story of the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. Eggers also opened the writing centre <a href="http://826valencia.org/about/">Valencia 826</a> in San Francisco, which helps children develop their writing skills (and inspired the <a href="http://www.sydneystoryfactory.org.au/our-inspiration/">Sydney Story Factory</a> and Melbourne’s <a href="http://www.100storybuilding.org.au/">100 Story Building</a>.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dave Eggers in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elliot Margolies/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Early in his career, Eggers often spoke of wanting to retreat into anonymity. Instead, he <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">seized</a> the reins of literary celebrity. Some then accused him of hypocrisy – in criticising fame while also inviting it. He has also been criticised for “excessive sincerity”, while journalist David Kirkpatrick <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/books/ambivalent-writer-turns-his-memoir-upside-down-denouncing-profits-publishers.html">called</a> Eggers “agonizingly ambivalent”. </p>
<p>Journalist James Sullivan <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Eggers-Surprised-By-Success-Author-to-read-from-2935959.php">notes</a> that Eggers</p>
<blockquote>
<p>treats his celebrity like a gold lamé suit: It’s amusing, absurd and, in his mind, not quite appropriate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, in her reading of Eggers’ 2003 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4954.You_Shall_Know_Our_Velocity_?from_search=true">You Shall Know Our Velocity</a>, Caroline Hamilton <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">suggests</a> that the central characters “resemble the credibility-obsessed younger Eggers torn between longing for celebrity and legitimacy”. </p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html">2000 email interview</a>, Eggers referred to himself as a sellout for having sold many books and appeared in various magazines. As Hamilton <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">writes</a>, the term sellout has less to do with wealth, and more to do with “the popularity that comes with it”.
Celebrity, then, remains a problem for those authors wishing to appear genuine and serious. </p>
<h2>Where are all the women?</h2>
<p>It is striking that female authors are, for the most part, excluded from all these agonised discussions about inner turmoil and perceived loss of prestige. This suggests that women are not often thought of as having substantial reputations in the first place. </p>
<p>Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, for instance, has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jw0Fu8nhOc">frequently appeared</a> on Oprah’s program to discuss her complex, poetically written, novels. In contrast to Franzen, however, Morrison’s credibility was never seen to be compromised in doing so. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Toni Morrison after being awarded the French Legion of Honour in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Philippe Wojazer/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite the number of talented women writing today for large audiences – Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison just to name a few – critics do not often think of female authors as having the kinds of monumental reputations that their male peers possess. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero">The Byronic hero</a>, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/5771776/Remembering_Hemingway_The_Endurance_of_the_Hemingway_Myth">the Hemingway legend</a>, and the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/13/behind_the_david_foster_wallace_myth/">Foster Wallace genius</a> are larger-than-life men. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret Atwood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Blinch/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Women are seldom discussed in such a way – with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Yet this may actually be a blessing for them. Avoiding the expectations that go along with literary celebrity can be an advantage. Female authors may be better able to breach certain boundaries – of genre, style, content – in ways that certain male authors cannot. </p>
<p>Ferrante, for instance, said she explicitly needed anonymity to write honestly. While some may see it as a bizarre sort of compliment to her that she is so intriguing that an Italian journalist spent weeks combing financial and property records to unmask her, she surely deserved the right to her privacy to focus on her own work. </p>
<p>Some of the most interesting genre-defying authors writing today are women such as Morrison, Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Perhaps, then, female authors can more seamlessly defy stringent boundaries that continue to define the literary world when they are not hailed as heroic geniuses.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Siobhan Lyons does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.Siobhan Lyons, Tutor in Media and Cultural Studies, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670492016-10-14T02:37:07Z2016-10-14T02:37:07ZIn honouring Dylan, the Nobel Prize judges have made a category error<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141710/original/image-20161014-3985-yme348.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dylan is a musician, who has been well recognised in his field.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/simonm1965/7662243224/">Simon Murphy/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1920, Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Prize in Literature 1907), published <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/103/50.html">The Conundrum of the Workshops</a>. This poem about review culture features the Devil as “first, most dread” critic who responds to human creative outputs with: “it’s pretty, but is it art?”, a review that hurls the makers into confusion, rivalry and anguish. What could be worse, for an artist, than to discover that what you were making is not art after all?</p>
<p>Social media has taken over the Devil’s role as “most dread” reviewer, and all night the twitterverse has been alive with commentators expressing their outrage at, or rejoicing over, the decision of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-bob-dylan-deserves-his-nobel-prize-in-literature-67017">Nobel Prize Committee to award the Literature prize to musician and songwriter Bob Dylan</a>. As journalist and writer Jason Diamond tweeted: “My timeline is like watching a ‘Dylan deserved the Nobel’ vs ‘Dylan didn’t deserve the Nobel’ ping pong match.”</p>
<p>Much of this ping-pong commentary operates less according to the rules of evidence and argument than according to the rules of quarrel; of personal taste; of anger directed at established privilege; and of teasing Boomer nostalgia.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141714/original/image-20161014-3969-twvzrw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Billy Collins, one of the most popular poets in America, supports Dylan’s win.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/5617580149/">David Shankbone/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the Affirmative team we have not-a-poet Salman Rushdie tweeting that “From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition”. </p>
<p>And there’s actual poet Billy Collins, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=0">who affirms the prize</a> because Dylan’s lyrics are “in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page”. </p>
<p>From the team for the Negative, there’s editor Chloe Angyal: “Literally zero women were awarded Nobels this year. Maybe someone can write a poignant, gravelly, somewhat atonal folk song about that”. </p>
<p>Or the writer Shay Stewart Bouley who tweeted about “peak white man music.” Or music journalist Everett True, <a href="https://everetttrue.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/bob-dylan-wins-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-some-facts/">who pokes fun at the committee</a>: “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature is like your third-rate English teacher at school, trying to look ‘cool’.” </p>
<p>Not all commentators have relied on personal taste or social politics: several observe something that struck me too: there seems to have been a category error in the awarding of this prize.</p>
<p>Novelist Jodi Picoult tweets: “I’m happy for Bob Dylan. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?src=hash">#ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy</a>?” From novelist Joanne Harris: “Is this the first time that a back catalogue of song lyrics has been judged eligible for a literary prize?” More bluntly, from novelist Jeff VanderMeer: </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"786564909991550976"}"></div></p>
<p>Is it possible that this award was determined according to the sort of logic set out by The Logician in Ionesco’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2007/oct/03/ionescosrhinocerosisasrele">Rhinoceros</a>: The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded only to those who have created literature. Bob Dylan was awarded the Prize. Therefore Dylan is a creator of literature?</p>
<p>Perhaps. I am very interested in the relationship between song lyrics and poetry, and it is a close relationship – the first poems were almost certainly sung – but centuries ago, the two creative modes parted company. They operate now according to a different logic, depend on different traditions, and are located within very different ecosystems. This is not a question of relative quality; it is a question of categories.</p>
<p>So, whether I admire Dylan’s body of work or not, whether I am a fan or not, I think the Nobel Prize Committee has made a category mistake. They awarded the prize to Dylan “<a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/">for having created new poetic expressions</a> within the great American song tradition”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Why not Patti Smith?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And I don’t argue with this at all. But does that mean his output is “work in the field of literature”? Not for my money. Dylan is a musician; he has been well recognised for his contributions to music, and more broadly to cultural life. </p>
<p>When Swedish Academy member Per Wastberg gushes that “He is probably the greatest living poet”, I can only say that Mr Wastberg should not be let anywhere near a literature prize. </p>
<p>And – taking my own place on the team for the Negative – if it must go to a songwriter, why Dylan? Did he need the money more than, say, Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin? Has he not had enough public attention? And were there really no writers – no poets, novelists, essayists, no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature – considered Nobel-worthy?</p>
<p>It’s very good to see that literature can still spark passion and outpourings of personal commentary; but I can’t help but read this decision as one that was discourteous to members of the field of literature, dismissive of women’s achievements, and fundamentally kinda nostalgic. Let me leave the last (tongue-in-cheek) word to writer Leah Kaminsky: “No woman wins any Nobel prize this year. Oh the times they ain’t a changin’.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67049/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>Were there really no poets or novelists or essayists - no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature - considered Nobel-worthy? This nostalgic decision is discourteous to writers.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/613002016-06-22T03:52:35Z2016-06-22T03:52:35ZWhy the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards need an urgent overhaul<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127664/original/image-20160622-19789-1gbywp0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What are the criteria for a Prime Minister intervening in these awards? Literary reasons? Personal reasons? 'History war' reasons?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Tapp</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Odd rules can help shape a writing prize’s long-term character in wonderful ways. But that’s not the case with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, set up by the Rudd government and first awarded in 2008. (In 2012, they also took in the PM’s Prize for Australian History, which John Howard had begun.) </p>
<p>The expanded awards — with separate categories for fiction, non-fiction, Australian history, poetry, YA and children’s books and a winner’s prize money of A$80,000 tax free — should be well-placed to be our pre-eminent national literary awards. Instead, they bob on the vast sea of daily politics, occasionally getting dumped by a breaker.</p>
<p>As Colin Steele, a former judge of the non-fiction award <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/how-the-sex-lives-of-australians-upset-a-pm-and-the-pms-literary-awards-20160606-gpcfxg.html">recently suggested</a>, the issues facing the Awards include Prime Ministerial interventions in deciding winners, the appointment and treatment of judges, and the quality and focus of publicity and marketing. </p>
<p>I’d add that the name doesn’t help: almost anything — from the silly (The Oi Oi Oi’s?) to the prosaic (National Book Awards?) — would be preferable to the current one.</p>
<p>But the key flaw in the Awards’ guidelines is <a href="http://arts.gov.au/funding/awards/pmla/2015/entry-guidelines">this</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Prime Minister makes the final decision on the awarding of the Awards, taking into account the recommendations of the judges. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Beth Driscoll <a href="http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7203">put it in 2008</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>To appreciate the true scandal of this potentiality, imagine the Queen actually choosing the Governor General!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Steele identifies three separate instances of prime ministerial intervention in the awards. In 2013, he writes, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/how-the-sex-lives-of-australians-upset-a-pm-and-the-pms-literary-awards-20160606-gpcfxg.html">Kevin Rudd overruled the judges’ recommendation</a> for the History Award, Frank Bongiorno’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15729089-the-sex-lives-of-australians">The Sex Lives of Australians: A History</a> (2012). The Award was then given to Ross McMullin’s collection of World War I personal histories, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13629194-farewell-dear-people">Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation</a> (2012).</p>
<p>In 2014, meanwhile, the fiction judges chose Steven Carroll’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17734472-a-world-of-other-people">A World of Other People</a> (2013), a novel about TS Eliot and London during the blitz, as the winner. But then <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-curious-case-of-the-prime-ministers-literary-awards-33467">PM Tony Abbott intervened</a> to make Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17905709-the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north">The Narrow Road to the Deep North</a> (2013) a joint winner. Years earlier, in 2006 (before the wider PM’s Literary Awards existed), John Howard had intervened to make Les Carlyon’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4751125-the-great-war">The Great War</a> (2006) a co-winner of the History Prize. </p>
<p>The lack of transparency around these awards is palpable. Should a Prime Minister intercede for purely literary reasons? Or are political reasons fine? Or “history war” reasons? Or local constituency reasons? Or personal reasons? </p>
<p>Can a PM reject a winner because of a cover image or an epigraph? Is a PM who wishes to intercede obliged to read all the shortlisted books? Can a PM “call in” a book that hasn’t made the shortlist or isn’t in competition?</p>
<p>In the meantime, judges engage in delicate debate and compromise amongst themselves, without knowing if they are actually choosing the winner. This is no clearly-defined two-tiered process – with one panel choosing a shortlist and another panel the winning book, as happens with the Pulitzer Prize. This is arbitrary.</p>
<p>Other complaints about the judging process have dogged the Awards. Senator George Brandis <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/committees/estimate/219a9210-1ca0-49cb-903b-3e1309393869/toc_pdf/Legal%20and%20Constitutional%20Affairs%20Legislation%20Committee_2014_05_28_2522_Official.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf#search=%22committees/estimate/219a9210-1ca0-49cb-903b-3e1309393869/0001%22">claimed in 2014</a> that the Labor-chosen panels lacked balance, as no judges were “conservative or even liberal democratic”. He suggested that that his government instead aimed for “balanced panels”, citing as examples Gerard Henderson as chair of the non-fiction and history panel (“conservative”) and Louise Adler as chair of the fiction and poetry panel (“a woman of the left”).</p>
<p>At around the same time as Brandis was complaining about past judges, Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik from Black Inc. <a href="https://dailyreview.com.au/can-gerard-henderson-judge-pms-literary-awards-fairly/6919/">protested the choice of Henderson</a> as a judge: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Henderson has a history of incessant and obsessive criticism of leading Australian writers and commentators with whom he disagrees politically … His appointment politicises what has until now been an apolitical award based on merit.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I happen to disapprove of Gerard Henderson’s politics, to the limited extent that I understand them. But any isolated scrutiny of a single judge mainly demonstrates the susceptibility of the awards to the politics of the moment, including the more tedious elements of the culture wars. </p>
<p>In any writing competition, a judge arrives with personal, political and literary baggage, preoccupations and biases. But judges also, ideally, bring a commitment to identifying and rewarding excellence that transcends their personal politics and previous public statements. </p>
<p>In turn, the judges’ collective decisions should provoke productive and passionate disagreement on literary, cultural and political grounds. In other words, in calling for changes to the PM’s Literary Awards, I am not seeking a saccharine or apolitical outcome. A prize’s idiosyncrasies can help define it. </p>
<p>For example, the flawed but magnificent legacy of the Miles Franklin Literary Award stems in large part from Franklin’s inspired stipulation that the winning novel (or play, if no novel measures up) should not only be of the “highest literary merit” but “must present Australian Life in any of its phases”. </p>
<p>The stipulation within the PM’s Literary Awards that a Prime Minister has the final say about winners is equally defining: it compromises the Awards’ credibility, purpose and depth.</p>
<p>That stipulation must go, without delay. To function effectively, the Awards need entrenched breathing space from the government that funds them. They need an unambiguous mandate: what are these Awards for?</p>
<p>And they need transparency. In the context of questioning Henderson as judge, Schwartz and Feik called for a published list of all entries received. In the spirit of critically celebrating the breadth of Australian writing, the PM’s Literary Awards – indeed, all major Australian book prizes – should embrace this suggestion.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I, for one, look forward to the 2017 judges of the PM’s Literary Awards perhaps choosing Niki Savva’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29415878-the-road-to-ruin">The Road to Ruin: how Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government</a> (2016) as the winner of the non-fiction award.</p>
<p>If this eventuates, what happens next may well depend on whether the Prime Minister is Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten … or perhaps even, by then, a reawakened Tony Abbott.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/61300/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Allington's novel Figurehead was published by Black Inc., a publisher this article discusses. He has served as a judge for several writing competitions, including the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature - but not the PM Literary Awards.</span></em></p>They should be our pre-eminent national writing prizes. Instead, these awards bob on the vast sea of daily politics, occasionally getting dumped by a breaker.Patrick Allington, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437692015-06-23T23:51:44Z2015-06-23T23:51:44ZSofie Laguna’s Miles Franklin win helps keep half the world visible<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86176/original/image-20150623-19368-fthlii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sofie Laguna last night became the fourth woman to win the Miles Franklin award in as many years.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Allen&Unwin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Miles Franklin Award may have been named after one of Australia’s great women writers, but it has long been synonymous in the literary world for novels that are invariably historical, set in rugged rural landscapes, and written by men.</p>
<p>Last night, Sofie Laguna became the <a href="http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/news">fourth woman to win</a> what is Australia’s most prestigious fiction prize in as many years, for her book <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/literary-fiction/The-Eye-of-the-Sheep-Sofie-Laguna-9781743319598">The Eye of the Sheep</a> (2014). Just as significantly, Laguna’s work marks a departure from the usual sorts of books that become Miles Franklin novels. </p>
<p>The Eye of the Sheep is a story about family dysfunction, social disadvantage and a mother’s love. It tells the story of young Jimmy Flick, whose world is shattered by alcoholism and domestic violence.</p>
<p>If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.</p>
<p>The judges said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The power of this finely crafted novel lies in its coruscating language, inventive and imaginative, reflecting Jimmy’s vivid inner world of light and connections and pulsing energy.</p>
<p>Laguna has a true ear for the rhythms of everyday dialogue, and her compassionate rendering of the frustrations – and compensations – of dealing with a child of sideways abilities, makes this novel an impressively eloquent achievement.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In another refreshing turn for the Miles Franklin, four out of the <a href="http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/2015/2015_shortlist.htm">five novels shortlisted</a> in 2015 were also by women writers, including Joan London, Sonya Hartnett, and debut novelist Christine Piper. The fifth shortlisted work was by Craig Sherborne.</p>
<p>Three out of the five shortlisted novels also deal with themes of family and childhood – themes that are so often marginalised as “women’s writing”; as domestic, interior, “feminine” and personal, as opposed to the so called “masculine” themes of history and national identity which have traditionally won the Miles Franklin Literary Award.</p>
<p>Two of the shortlisted authors, Laguna and Sonya Hartnett, originally made their name writing for children and young adults. They are brilliant literary writers in a genre whose authors have all too often been under-recognised. </p>
<p>Perhaps this change is partly due to the work done in recent years by the <a href="http://thestellaprize.com.au/the-count/">Stella</a> and <a href="http://www.vidaweb.org/category/the-count/">VIDA counts</a>, which have charted the gender bias that governs the literary establishment both here and in the United States. </p>
<p>This bias is not only due to the very real and ongoing under-representation of women on awards lists and in the books pages, but shapes the way we think about literary merit – a whole complicated fabric of assumptions about seriousness, significance, authority and gender in writing. </p>
<p>It is embedded in deeply held beliefs about what constitutes a work of serious literary intent and a conviction that certain kinds of subject matter are more significant, worthy, and therefore literary than others.</p>
<p>As Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, infamously <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/04/research-male-writers-dominate-books-world">responded</a> to the 2011 VIDA study: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>More recently, the NSW Board of Studies <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/gender-imbalance-in-hsc-english-texts-criticised-20141123-11r5c4.html%5D">responded to criticisms</a> of gender bias in the school literature curriculum by stating that the exclusion of women’s writing was a product of decisions related to “quality”. </p>
<p>Yet names such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing – and indeed Sofie Laguna – testify to the fact that there is no absence of “quality” in the work of woman authors. </p>
<p>What is wrong?</p>
<p>Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin abandoned the name Stella in order to be taken seriously as a writer. The name Miles was adopted in the hope that her work would be better received as the work of a man. </p>
<p>In adopting a male pseudonym Miles Franklin joined writers such as Henry Handel Richardson, George Eliot and George Sand who all published under male pen names in an attempt to conceal their true gender. </p>
<p>Even the Brontes published under male pseudonyms in their lifetime. Charlotte became Currer Bell, Anne became Acton Bell and Emily became Ellis Bell. </p>
<p>But in a world forged through a history of sexism, the adoption of a male pen name did not spare Miles Franklin. Henry Lawson wrote about My Brilliant Career:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hadn’t read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once – that the story had been written by a girl […] I don’t know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book – I leave that to girl readers to judge.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sofie Laguna joins 11 of Australia’s most distinguished female authors who have been recipients of the Miles Franklin Literary Award across its 50-year history. These include Evie Wild, Michelle de Kretser, Anna Funder, Alexis Wright, Shirley Hazzard, Thea Astley (four times), Jessica Anderson (twice), Glenda Adams, Elizabeth Jolley, Elizabeth O’Connor and Ruth Park. </p>
<p>There are many criticisms that could justifiably be made of the culture of literary prizes. But awards do make a difference to the kinds of conversations that go on around and about writers and writing, the kinds of books that get reviewed, that go on display at the front rather than the back of the bookshop, and ultimately the kinds of books that get read. </p>
<p>I may be a hapless romantic, but I continue to think that literature has the capacity to shape much of what we think and feel about the world. It would be a sad thing if half of that world stayed invisible.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43769/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/359812015-01-28T06:26:30Z2015-01-28T06:26:30ZWhy popular culture is mad for medical fiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70206/original/image-20150127-17625-111w44y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C2334%2C1635&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Macdonald, winner of the 2014 Costa Book of the Year.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marzena Pogorzaly</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Whatever your opinion of book prizes, they remain a useful tool for understanding what is popular in the literary world. The Costa Book of the Year, awarded this year to Helen Macdonald for her book <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/04/samuel-johnson-prize-helen-macdonald-h-is-for-hawk">H is for Hawk</a>, provides one such example. </p>
<p>H is for Hawk is grief-tinged, part memoir and part nature book, Macdonald’s account of training a goshawk as a way of dealing with her father’s death.</p>
<p>Another of the category winning titles, Emma Healey’s “dementia detective story” <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/08/elizabeth-is-missing-review-emma-healey-impressive-debut-dementia">Elizabeth is Missing</a> also concerns illness. And last year’s Costa award went to Nathan Filer’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/nathan-filers-stunning-debut-wins-costa-book-award-22416">The Shock of the Fall</a>, which explores mental illness. </p>
<p>So there seems to be a growing trend towards fictional and factual writing about the experience and effects of illness. </p>
<p>A cursory glance at contemporary culture confirms that this is not confined to books. Films, TV shows, and other media all frequently use medicine in their narratives. The soon-to-be released <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3316960/">Still Alice</a> features Julianne Moore struggling with Alzheimer’s, while <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1306980/">50/50</a>, starring Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon Levitt, managed to take a darkly humourous yet moving look at cancer. </p>
<p>In TV, the success of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/">House</a> has made Hugh Laurie an A-list star. Elsewhere, graphic novelists and cartoonists such as <a href="http://www.makingwaves.org/news/brick-s-graphic-novel/">Brick</a> and <a href="http://davidsmallbooks.com/">David Small</a> seek to represent the experience of illness in visual art. And there are many first-hand accounts of real-life experience dedicated to the representation of physical and mental illness. </p>
<p>Many universities now offer courses in Medical Humanities, the academic study of medicine, illness, and the arts. Certainly the academic and popular appreciation of medical narratives in relation to life writing and autobiography has increased in recent years, something that academic <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1jX3_RyedfcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=leigh+gilmore&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ja7HVMjqCajW7QbA_oGwCQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=leigh%20gilmore&f=false">Leigh Gilmore</a> has attributed to a greater tendency towards introspection around the turn of the millennium.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZrXrZ5iiR0o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Critics have suggested, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1g3iaku6QY0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Illness+as+Narrative++By+Ann+Jurecic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KMXHVKSlJqTn7gaCyYCoDA&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Illness%20as%20Narrative%20%20By%20Ann%20Jurecic&f=false">as Ann Jurecic notes</a> that this interest in illness is, like the “misery memoir”, another fashion. Illness is this decade’s hot literary topic, or an academic fad. But I would disagree. When the <a href="http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/">Wellcome Trust</a>, the foremost funding body in the history of medicine, hosts a series of public exhibitions and their own <a href="http://wellcomebookprize.org/">book prize</a>, I think it’s clear that this is a trend which is well entrenched in the public sphere. </p>
<h2>More than a fad</h2>
<p>It is tempting to see the growth of cultural interest in medicine as a modern development. It could indicate greater social acceptance of illness, or a willingness to share what once would have been kept largely private. Virginia Woolf once wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Considering how common illness is … it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>So is the prevalence of medical literature in book prizes evidence that we’re more open and sensitive than past generations? No. This is as fictitious an idea as any hospital drama.</p>
<p>Despite the recent rise in medical-themed writing, the history of medicine and literature goes back much further than this modern interest (or Virginia Woolf). There are medical themes in Western literature dating back to the epics of ancient Greece. </p>
<p>And across time, representations of illness have altered repeatedly to reflect the diseases of the day. In that sense, these texts provide a good barometer of the particular problems of an era. For example, illness and disease were used within fiction to explore anxieties over morality and class in the 19th century, such as in Charles Dickens’ <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/23/charles-dickens-favourite-dombey-son">Dombey & Son</a> (1848). In the Cold War, illness allowed writers to fictionalise fears of nuclear conflict, such as in the post-apocalyptic society of Richard Matheson’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/03/i-am-legend-vampire-novel-century">I Am Legend</a> (1954). More recently, writers have used illness to consider terrorism, as in Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of novels beginning with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/bookerprize2003.bookerprize">Oryx & Crake</a> (2003). </p>
<p>Many specifically, modern reasons have shaped fictional and factual medical narratives over the past 25 years. In our own time, concerns over the UK’s ageing population, the NHS in crisis, or the widespread diagnosis of certain conditions (particularly mental health conditions) might all be increasing interest in medical fiction and illness experiences. </p>
<p>I also have a hunch that reflecting on our own mortality through the illness narrative is a response to the superficiality of the modern world. In a life lived through smartphones and in the virtual spaces of social media, the illness narrative might be a way of tapping into raw emotion once more. If modern life feels dispersed and inauthentic, illness is tangible. </p>
<p>Literature academic <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-NuQbmau__AC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Miriam Bailin suggests</a> that in the Victorian period, illness helped create bonds between people in a period of great social tension due to political upheaval. Applying this to our own time, perhaps medical literature and illness narratives are performing a similar process – illness possesses a strong power in emphasising a shared humanity that cuts across the divides of a multicultural and multi-faith society.</p>
<p>Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the fever for the medical narrative is not about to break any time soon.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35981/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Goodman has received funding from The Wellcome Trust (for previous research projects).</span></em></p>Whatever your opinion of book prizes, they remain a useful tool for understanding what is popular in the literary world. The Costa Book of the Year, awarded this year to Helen Macdonald for her book H…Sam Goodman, Lecturer In Linguistics, Bournemouth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/360282015-01-13T06:08:29Z2015-01-13T06:08:29ZWant to be the next David Harsent? A guide on how to write a poem<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68761/original/image-20150112-23804-ifwuk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What are you waiting for? Just write!</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/s/poetry+writing/search.html?page=2&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=188211992">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year the UK’s biggest poetry award, the TS Eliot prize, has gone to David Harsent for his 11th collection, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/12/david-harsent-wins-ts-eliot-prize-poetry-fire-songs">Fire Songs</a>. He joins a sequence of prestigious poets such as Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott and Carol Ann Duffy. You may not feel you have much on the crème de la crème of the poetry world, but writing a poem is less daunting than it may appear. Here’s why you should try writing a poem – and how.</p>
<p>We must acknowledge that poetry is fundamentally useless at the start. But humans have written and recited verse without reason since ancient times. So despite the superficial instrumentality of our culture, despite what economists might have you believe, the old Biblical pronouncement needs reaffirming: “Man does not live by bread alone”.</p>
<p>So why write poetry? For me, writing a poem is a form of emotional excreta; it’s something that at times of intense feeling I can’t help doing – it spills out, unrestrained. The craft of poetry, of course, is going back to that pavement pizza of pain, love, heartbreak, fury, desire, and reworking it into shape. You alter each line, replace words, manipulate the rhythm until you get a perfect balance and maximum power to the poem; but rework it so as not to lose that intense emotional kernel. Without this, the words, no matter how well-crafted, would be an empty shell. </p>
<p>But getting started can be difficult. There have been some innovative ways of encouraging people to write poetry – a <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/01/elegy-dead-world/">video game</a> that gets you to fill in the blanks from poems by Wordsworth and Shelley while running round virtual worlds is an interesting example of this. But for those who are after a more straightforward induction, here are some tips on how to get those emotions on to the page – coherently.</p>
<h2>The shit filter</h2>
<p>The first challenge for the writer is to (temporarily) discard what is vulgarly known in the trade as the “shit filter” – that disabling self-critical anxiety that tells us what we write is utterly worthless. We should remember that the writer’s primary task is to annihilate the empty page. Only once the page is full should we use the critical, analytical, judgemental part of the brain (apply the shit filter if you like) and begin crafting the rough clay into something beautiful.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68762/original/image-20150112-23807-1ylvjdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fire Songs: David Harsent.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s perhaps best not to start on this endeavour alone. Where possible bounce your attempts off others and read and comment on their work. Beyond this face-to-face interaction, it is helpful to create an online blog where you can publish your work and get feedback from other writers.</p>
<h2>Resistance</h2>
<p>It’s often thought that some people and poetry don’t mix. I, for example, have colleagues who have taught groups of men, including prisoners, who think it’s weak and effeminate to write poetry. When I encounter such resistance <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3od114a4o7Y">I bring Gil Scott-Heron to my aid</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I was a teenager, man, we didn’t want to hear nothin’ about poetry…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then Scott-Heron goes on to tell how he came to find a revolutionary voice through using his own words, those of the street and the ghetto. </p>
<p>By the time I’ve shown these surly, suspicious young men Hegley performing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB_hl1CFbZc">My Glasses</a>, Zephaniah reciting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhaXDfIGGzA">No Problem</a>, Linton Kwesi Johnson singing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls9pSdVFaJU">Sonny’s Lettah</a> and John Cooper Clarke reading <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-aVtKEhpO0">Twat</a>, you can’t hold them back. These are tough, powerful, clever, revolutionary and funny role models: writing poetry quickly becomes more gratifying than watching football.</p>
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<h2>Getting going</h2>
<p>There are many ways of getting going. Some exercises we use in creative writing classes will give you a much easier start. My colleague Alyson Morris begins with “found poetry” – taking newspaper articles and having students turn them into poems by reworking the spacing and lines. I use a similar process, though this self-generated by students, in which they write prose rants and then forge them into “angry poems”. Why not try this yourself?</p>
<p>Reading poetry helps, of course, as does studying the lyrics of your favourite songwriters. Cross the boundaries of time and genre from Shakespeare to Shelley to Duffy, from Bashō to Byron to Brecht, from Keats to Yeats to Plath, Neruda, Dylan, Tony Harrison, Joe Strummer and Lemn Sissay.</p>
<p>Don’t give up on your first attempt. In the words of Beckett:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.<br>
Try again. Fail again. Fail better </p>
</blockquote>
<p>With each redrafting your poem will improve. </p>
<p>One thing I do as a teacher is involve students in the wider community. We have the <a href="http://blogs.coventry.ac.uk/coventrywords/">Coventry Words</a> magazine in which students publish their poems. Have a look around for local magazines and creative writing groups in your area, or start a zine yourself.</p>
<p>I’ll end these reflections with an extract from Byron’s satirical poem Don Juan, as a counterpoint to my initial assertion that poetry is useless:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But words are things, and a small drop of ink,<br>
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces<br>
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think…</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36028/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Kelly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This year the UK’s biggest poetry award, the TS Eliot prize, has gone to David Harsent for his 11th collection, Fire Songs. He joins a sequence of prestigious poets such as Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott and…Tim Kelly, Principal Lecturer in Creative Writing, Coventry UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/342192014-12-04T06:08:21Z2014-12-04T06:08:21ZWhy I’d say yes, yes, yes to the Bad Sex award<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65979/original/image-20141201-20598-5rxrz4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Best to keep it under the covers?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-78972082/stock-photo-dier-a-couple-feet-in-bed-love-sex-and-partners.html?src=30u7kaBsN7ijQkXuNIdUEw-1-8">Lisa S.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sexual intercourse is getting on a bit. Not only has it been boosting the human population since we emerged from the primordial swamp, it’s more than half a century since Philip Larkin noted its arrival on the cultural scene in his poem <a href="http://allpoetry.com/Annus-Mirabilis">Annus Mirabilis</a>. Until then it was, Larkin writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A shame that started at sixteen<br>
And spread to everything. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For thousands of years, sex had lurked behind curtains and in the sub-text of innuendos. Suddenly, it was a matter for discussion, celebration and artistic exploration. This was good news for sex, perhaps, but not for writers, as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30307247">Ben Okri has just found out</a> after winning the Literary Review’s 2014 <a href="http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/badsexshortlist2014.php">Bad Sex in Fiction Award</a>. </p>
<p>I speak from experience, having essayed a few torrid moments in my last novel <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ky-uAgAAQBAJ">Dark Aemilia</a>. Given that my protagonist had inspired the later, bleaker Shakespeare sonnets, which give a compelling insight into the pain of unrequited or rejected love, it seemed appropriate that she and the infatuated Mr WS should engage in an obsessive sexual romance. So the script demanded that they take their clothes off, and, having taken them off, that they engage in the sort of sex that was likely to obsess them. </p>
<p>In our lust-soaked culture I felt there was no way the reader would accept a chastely sanitised Lurve without some robust consummation. But I worried that the spirit of bad writing might be chasing me down the Jacobean corridors, so I kept it brief. The fairly elliptical bouts of shagging which enliven my narrative will not give EL James pause for thought – there is no throbbing, few body part references and not a silken cord in sight. </p>
<p>But perhaps omission, metaphor and suggestion are sexier than, well, sex. It is difficult to write about the act of love without resorting to knicker-dampening cliché, or the most appalling schmaltz. New words should be made available if we want to carry on depicting “scenes of a sexual nature” – and the fact that the language of raw physicality is limited is demonstrated by the rarity of raw physical writing. </p>
<p>Most novelists don’t explore the animalistic elements of our being in much depth. When we write about eating and drinking, we focus on the food and the wine, not the act of chewing and swallowing. The delineation of everyday living doesn’t usually include trips to the loo – though in my first novel I did have an explicit weeing sequence, written from the point of a man. And vomiting is relatively underexplored. Orgasm has had far more literary attention than the ungovernable heave. </p>
<p>Which brings me back to the <a href="http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/badsexshortlist2014.php">Bad Sex in Fiction Award</a>. Given that both Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan and Haruki Murakami are on the shortlist, it’s clear that being a great writer is no protection against poor sex prose. (Other former nominees include Jonathan Franzen, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.) So who is writing about sex well? Where is the excellent literary shagging to be had? Is the library scene in <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6X2nmK-nsLEC&">Atonement</a> a best-practice example? Are there brilliant sex scenes that have slipped my mind?</p>
<p>As in fashion, pop music and all forms of culinary art since Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, it has all been done before. It’s hard to “make it new” as Ezra Pound exhorted writers to do. Readers have already been shocked by the inchoate loin-count in <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7JAiyO6F2xAC&">Lady Chatterley’s Lover</a>; the joys of compulsive teen masturbation in <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yqeswztmtOQC">Portnoy’s Complaint</a>; the fetishisation of the “c” word in <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ProgRjTL8FIC">Tropic of Cancer</a> and by <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bCzBMxa7RkEC">Fear of Flying</a> with its “zipless fuck”. It says something about the current state of sex writing that the most exciting innovation of the last five years has been the mainstreaming of “mummy porn” in <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6IyMBAAAQBAJ">Fifty Shades of Grey</a>.</p>
<p>Perhaps the way lies ahead not in explicit writing but in experimental fiction. DH Lawrence wrote about sex very badly indeed – ludicrously, insanely, improbably. In an attempt to be honest, direct and – yes – animalistic, he boldly overwrote where no man had overwritten before. Conversely, he also wrote about sex with courage and originality, using impressionistic sensory description to convey the sexual sensibility of women in a way that few male novelists have attempted since. And he should also get some points for his willingness to write about bad sex. Paradoxically, the sex in contemporary bad sex writing usually attempts to depict very good sex indeed. It’s as if the couplings described must emulate how we imagine the pretty writhings of Hollywood’s finest. </p>
<p>So where does this leave my future relationship with the sexual paragraph? Will my characters get down and dirty again? I’m not sure. If I can find a way to write about the “inchoate” without sounding like a breathless purveyor of lady porn, I may give it a try. I’m certainly not put off by the idea of winning a Bad Sex award. With so much dire sex to contend with, it would be an accolade of sorts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34219/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally O'Reilly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Sexual intercourse is getting on a bit. Not only has it been boosting the human population since we emerged from the primordial swamp, it’s more than half a century since Philip Larkin noted its arrival…Sally O'Reilly, Lecturer in Creative Writing, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/330632014-11-27T17:48:14Z2014-11-27T17:48:14ZFive African novels to read before you die<p>There is a surfeit of book prizes. Big ones, small ones, ones that award experimental fiction, others that concentrate on female authors, or young authors, or authors from Ireland or Latin America. African literature is blossoming, and its prize culture is flourishing alongside. The Caine Prize is well-established, and the last few years have seen the establishment of the <a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/11/new-prize-african-literature-announced">Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize</a> for work in African languages (announced on November 18), the <a href="http://www.etisalat.com.ng/eventsandsponsorships/prizeForLiterature.php">Etisalat Prize</a> for first time authors, and the <a href="http://www.sala.org.za/">South African Literary Awards</a>.</p>
<p>None of these are recognised on a global level, and so people following this growing trend were excited when this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature re-ignited speculation that the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o would receive the award. His fans reasoned that the recent death of Chinua Achebe might focus the minds of the Swedish Academy on their pioneering and accomplished, but now ageing, generation of African writers. </p>
<p>But it was not to be. So to partly address this yawning oversight, here’s a list of five of the greatest African novels:</p>
<h2>1) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65707/original/image-20141127-19180-5jralj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin</span></span>
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<p>Things Fall Apart comprehensively imagines how the Nigerian Igbo community functioned prior to colonialism. The divisions in this community accompany the tragic fall of the hero, Okonkwo, whose heroic but rash stand against colonialism ends in a lonely suicide. Achebe’s wisdom is sufficient to move readers beyond recriminations or historical blame, since the Igbo community adapts to accommodate Christianity and new forms of colonial governance. Just as the novel’s title quotes Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, Achebe’s African philosophy of balance in all things works towards a millennial partnership with Western modernity.</p>
<h2>2) Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood (1977)</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65708/original/image-20141127-21966-ygssdz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>This is the great novel of African socialism. Petals of Blood reaches beyond its native Kenya to embrace the wider black histories of the Caribbean and the US. Drawing together four village outcasts – a teacher, an ex-Mau Mau soldier, a student teacher and a barmaid – the novel intertwines the characters’ memories and life-experiences to construct a shared communal past. Ngugi accumulates a deep communal history of colonial, multi-national capitalist, and post-Independence theft. Charting the development and decline of a single village from Edenic pastoral to apocalyptic disorder, Petals of Blood likens the endlessly regenerating African socialist struggle to the Biblical resurrection.</p>
<h2>3) Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1968)</h2>
<p>Armah’s novel reflects on the existential predicament of one honest man, a lone moral beacon in the corrupt last days of the Ghana’s Nkrumah regime. Amid the greed of all who chase the “gleam” of possessions and wealth, Armah’s unnamed man endures slights from his political friends and chastisement from his wife. When the Nkrumah government eventually falls, the man becomes the ironic saviour of those who have attempted to corrupt him. The man’s moral purposes become vindicated for a moment and they anticipate a future in which the “Beautyful Ones” will one day be born. </p>
<h2>4) Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988)</h2>
<p>A young Rhodesian girl, Tambu, dreams of going to school in a family that favours her brother. Breaking with her female destiny to work in the fields and bear children, Tambu realises her ambition of attending her uncle’s mission school. But all is not well. Tambu’s cousin, Nyasha, is aware of the trap of a colonial education, which empowers individuals at the cost of their belonging to family and community. As Tambu’s dream materialises, Nervous Conditions charts Nyasha’s increasingly self-destructive eating disorder in a futile rebellion against patriarchy and history.</p>
<h2>5) Bessie Head, Maru (1977)</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65709/original/image-20141127-10301-o3wdyy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Waveland Press</span></span>
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<p>A powerful love story written during Head’s exile from Apartheid South Africa. Margaret Cadmore is a young Masarwa (Bushman) woman adopted and educated by a British namesake. Margaret’s identity breaks the usual categories in the Botswanan village of Dilepe, where her people are slaves. Unknowingly, she inspires a deadly love-rivalry between two powerful men, Maru and his best friend Moleka. Maru defeats Moleka and kidnaps Margaret through the wiles of witchcraft and suggestion. His marriage to Margaret has the effect of freeing her people from slavery. However, in an unconscious room in her mind, Margaret continues to dream of Moleka. </p>
<p>These novels contain stories that Africans themselves want to tell, stories that imagine a world exceeding all expectation. Their world, it is true, contains its elements of suffering, but it also offers the surprises of triumph, community, magic, justice, philosophy, wisdom, humour and the habits of African dailiness.</p>
<p>In celebration of African literature, readers can judge for themselves which of these great novels merit plaudits and accolades. So this year, stop that desperate rifling through the Booker and Nobel lists to find something to buy distant relatives for Christmas. Your list is right here.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33063/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brendon Nicholls has previously received research funding from the CSIR (South Africa), the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (South Africa), the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (United Kingdom) and the White Rose Consortium (United Kingdom).</span></em></p>There is a surfeit of book prizes. Big ones, small ones, ones that award experimental fiction, others that concentrate on female authors, or young authors, or authors from Ireland or Latin America. African…Brendon Nicholls, Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Literatures, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/345982014-11-25T03:29:50Z2014-11-25T03:29:50ZThe lesson about diversity at this year’s National Book Awards<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65401/original/image-20141125-19633-xugybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson speaks to a group of young readers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tulsa City-County Library/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In his 2005 book <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435">The Economy of Prestige</a>, James F. English influentially argued that prizes thrive on scandal. Just last week, scholar Kathleen Horning claimed this year’s National Book Awards could <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-this-years-national-book-awards-could-change-the-face-of-childrens-literature-33125">change the face of children’s literature</a>. They could both be right – but where does this leave <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2014.html">the 2014 winners</a>?</p>
<p>Jacqueline Woodson won the 2014 National Book Award for young people’s literature with her wonderful memoir, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821284-brown-girl-dreaming">brown girl dreaming</a> – but her win was overshadowed by a racist anecdote told at the ceremony. </p>
<p>Book awards act as miniature social contracts: some very smart, very knowledgeable people can spend all those hours many of us would like to have to read lots of books, and tell us which books we should really make time for. They will wade through thousands of pages of boring, irrelevant or poorly-written words, and they will find the literary pearls. After all, that’s why book awards are given for “excellence” or “literary merit”.</p>
<p>In practice, of course, nothing about book awards is so clear or so easy, as this year’s ceremony shows.</p>
<p>Excellence and literary merit are notoriously slippery concepts, and <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/tony-abbott-chooses-conservatives-to-judge-the-prime-ministers-literary-awards-20140524-zrn0m.html">the politics of book awards</a> often seem to be more obvious than the inherent value of prize-winning books. Even when a particular award is not seen to be partisan or politic, James F. English makes a convincing case that the main function of book awards is to generate publicity – preferably through scandal or controversy – and thus ensure the ongoing existence of the awards themselves. </p>
<p>Seen in this light, the 2014 National Book Awards may be one of the most successful book awards in recent history. As the bright-orange banner <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org">announcement</a> which this week headed the US-based National Book Foundation’s website somewhat coyly says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On Wednesday evening, November 19, 2014, at the National Book Awards, comments were made by the master of ceremonies which were entirely inappropriate, were not authorized by the National Book Foundation and which do not in any way represent the views of this organization. We regret the incident and apologize to all offended by the remarks, especially Jacqueline Woodson. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This statement illustrates a range of ongoing tensions around book awards, children’s literature, and diversity. Ironically, these tensions are revealed in their absence: you could read the NBF’s statement, and have no idea that diversity, cultural power, or the politics of race were factors at all. </p>
<p>For those not in the know, the “master of ceremonies” was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Handler">Daniel Handler</a>, a prolific and popular children’s writer, best known to millions of readers by his nom-de-plume, Lemony Snicket. </p>
<p>The “comments” which comprise the “incident” involve some truly awful language and ideas about African-American culture. I don’t want to reproduce them here, because they’re offensive. They were couched in an attitude of entitlement based on explicit assertions of cultural superiority and an implicit assumption about the right to speak from a position of power about disempowerment. </p>
<p>In short, the incident was <a href="http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=387:whiteness05a&catid=69&Itemid=165">white privilege</a> on display.</p>
<p>It is perhaps because people who work with children’s literature have spent years thinking of Daniel Handler as an ally – for children’s books, for literacy, and for <a href="http://www.ala.org/awardsgrants/lemony-snicket">librarians</a> – that the awfulness of the awards ceremony was such a shock. It is true that Handler has been, and will continue to be, a force for good in children’s literature, but now it may be by way of his full and frank admission of “<a href="https://twitter.com/DanielHandler/status/535772077354397696">monstrously inappropriate and yes, racist</a>” remarks. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jacqueline Woodson reads from brown girl dreaming.</span></figcaption>
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<p>However one feels about Handler’s ensuing donations to the grassroots organisation <a href="http://weneeddiversebooks.org">WeNeedDiverseBooks</a> (WNDB) as an act of redress, the money will be put to good use.</p>
<p>WNDB began, just this year, as part of a groundswell of visible, audible, shareable activism for diversity in children’s literature. As the name suggests, it seeks to promote “diverse, non-majority narratives in children’s literature”. I’ve made donations to the organisation myself. </p>
<p>Part of its activism is focused on resourcing diverse books for young people and, as such, WNDB <a href="http://weneeddiversebooks.org/where-to-find-diverse-books/">includes links</a> to several book awards on its website. WNDB reminds us, then, that book awards <em>can</em> be powerful tools for advocacy and social justice.</p>
<p>Sadly, in their understandable effort to address a spiralling situation, the National Book Foundation’s statement (above) may have missed its opportunity to be such a tool. What the statement doesn’t say is that Jacqueline Woodson’s gorgeous, powerful, and important work for readers of all ages, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821284-brown-girl-dreaming">brown girl dreaming</a>, not only exists, but won the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. </p>
<p>If brown girl dreaming goes missing in this conversation, we are in a sad state of affairs. Woodson’s verse text is a powerhouse memoir. As it weaves memory, story, and history into a series of connected poems, one of the stories told by brown girl dreaming is of the challenges many young people face: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A moment when you walk into a room and/ no one there is like you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Woodson’s book, then, reminds us that it would be a mistake to think that this is one pop-culture incident that can or should be forgotten. The long history of systemic racism which variously shaped brown girl dreaming and informed Handler’s comments continues to shape children’s literature and our culture as a whole. </p>
<p>As Lee and Low Books <a href="http://blog.leeandlow.com/2014/11/20/what-daniel-handlers-national-book-award-comments-say-about-publishing/">point out</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the joke may have been Handler’s, but the environment which made a joke like that permissible is everyone’s problem and responsibility. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Spend some time thinking about what you can do to challenge systemic racism, to acknowledge privilege (where you have it, and where you don’t), to state clearly that racism is unacceptable and to act accordingly. Donate to the WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign. Start asking your booksellers, your librarians and your teachers how they can help you diversify your reading habits. </p>
<p>But also, please read Woodson’s brown girl dreaming: it really is a wonderful book.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34598/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erica Hateley receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She has donated money to #WeNeedDiverseBooks.</span></em></p>In his 2005 book The Economy of Prestige, James F. English influentially argued that prizes thrive on scandal. Just last week, scholar Kathleen Horning claimed this year’s National Book Awards could change…Erica Hateley, Senior Lecturer in Children's and Adolescent Literature, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/334222014-11-13T14:52:50Z2014-11-13T14:52:50ZA double win for Ali Smith indicates there are too many book prizes – but so what?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64468/original/v7dpkqwx-1415878263.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ali Smith with her second book prize of the week.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ben Queenborough</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ali Smith has won the second ever <a href="http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize/">Goldsmiths Prize</a> for boldly original fiction for <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/07/how-to-be-both-review-ali-smith-dual-narrative-francesco-del-cossa">How To Be Both</a>. There are two narrative sections to the book – and two versions of the actual novel. Which one you read simply depends on which version you pick up off the bookshop shelves. One part is narrated by 16-year-old George, who has recently lost her mother; the other by a 15th-century artist. </p>
<p>Two is apparently Smith’s magic number – she has now won two awards in the past two days: on November 11 she was awarded the <a href="http://www.saltiresociety.org.uk/news/2014/11/11/saltire-literary-awards-2014-announced">Saltire Society Literary Book of the Year Award</a>. Speaking of the importance of her Goldsmiths win, Smith praised the bravery of a prize which explicitly recognised the creative possibilities of the novel form. Tim Parnell, founder and literary director of The Goldsmiths Prize, explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a real need for a prize that rewards fiction at its most novel. Clearly, there is an appetite among readers for fiction which is restless with the constraints of convention and willing to draw on and exploit the near endless resources and possibilities of the novel form.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Readability or creativity?</h2>
<p>Recently the major literary prizes, especially the <a href="http://www.themanbookerprize.com/">Man Booker</a>, have been criticised for seeming to eschew truly innovative fiction in favour of “readability.” John Berger’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/19/john-berger-g-classics-booker">G</a> (1972) and James Kellman’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/14/booker-club-james-kelman-how-late">How Late It Was, How Late</a> (1994), both Booker-winning novels, are often cited as examples of experimental writing that would not be rewarded by the prize as it is today. It is perhaps telling that Smith has been thrice shortlisted for the Booker, and twice for the Orange Prize – and yet never won.</p>
<p>In its first year the prize was won by Eimear McBride’s frankly staggering <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/20/girl-half-formed-thing-review">A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing</a>. The novel took nine years to find a publisher before <a href="http://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/">Galley Beggar Press</a> took it up (it is now co-published with Faber), and went on to be nominated for a slew of awards – including this year’s inaugural <a href="http://www.thefolioprize.com/">Folio Prize</a> – and win amongst others, the 2014 <a href="http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/">Bailey’s Prize</a> (previously the Orange Prize) for female novelists.</p>
<p>Just these two authors between them flag up the range of literary prizes there are. Obvious questions are quick to follow: are there too many prizes and aren’t they all just doing the same thing? </p>
<p>That a novel celebrated for experimental and uncompromising narrative style can win both a prize for innovative fiction and also a much more mainstream award (and others besides) can be seen in two ways. Either it’s a comment on the growing acceptance and demand for original fiction, or a cause to question the value of literary prizes when the same books repeatedly monopolise accolades. And the prizes certainly have shortlisted many of the same books, as writer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/oct/02/2014-goldsmiths-prize-not-creative-or-daring">Nikesh Shukla</a> criticised. </p>
<h2>Publicity powerhouses</h2>
<p>The inclusion of a novel on a short or longlist, even if it does not go on to win, cannot be underestimated. Jonathan Ruppin, web editor at <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/">Foyles Bookshop</a>, who has sat on the judging panels for six literary awards (including two forthcoming in 2015), said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>As the number of books released in a year continues to swell and coverage of books in the mainstream media continues to shrink the coverage afforded to literary, awards is becoming an ever-more important sales factor. Indeed, for many novels, the chance of making a shortlist for a well-publicised award is often a significant part of stated promotional plans and publication is undertaken in the knowledge that without such an accolade, the book is likely to be a commercial failure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are a number of other new literary awards with a very clear focus. The <a href="http://greencarnationprize.com/">Green Carnation</a> (established in 2010) recognises the work of LGBT authors and the <a href="http://www.newwritingnorth.com/writers-prize-award-literature-page-2090.html">Gordon Burn Prize</a> which, like the Goldsmiths Prize, awards “literature which challenges perceived notions of genre”. This niche positioning suggests an attempt to wrest attention from the simplistic notion of “the best novel” to something more innovative and audacious, often from literary communities that have previously been unrecognised by such awards. </p>
<p>Although Smith is already a very well-known author – and is with one of the most famous publishing houses – she made a point, in her acceptance speech, of commending Penguin for its courage in supporting her formally innovative novel. Alongside established publishers taking risks with well-known authors are pioneering indie presses such as Galley Beggar, <a href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/">Melville House</a>, <a href="http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/">Reality Street</a>, <a href="http://www.cbeditions.com/">CB editions</a>, and <a href="http://unbound.co.uk/">Unbound</a>, all of whom continue to recognise and support experimental writing. </p>
<p>Parnell said that a publishers had mentioned to him that the prize: “had encouraged them to take on more innovative and daring fiction. There could be no better endorsement of the prize’s raison d’être than this”. Whilst the Booker prize changed its <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/09/all-must-have-prizes">submissions policy</a> to favour publishers of previous Booker winners, the Goldsmiths Prize’s brief seems to complement the work of these small presses. </p>
<p>So, are there too many literary prizes? Yes, probably. But – and there’s a big but here – ultimately the large number of literary prizes, in Britain and elsewhere, do succeed in clawing back a focus on the novel and the book trade. Since these prizes demonstrate the ability to influence the number of people reading about, talking about, and finally buying and reading books, there is no way they can ever be a bad thing. They might even change the way we think about fiction.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33422/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Darling does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ali Smith has won the second ever Goldsmiths Prize for boldly original fiction for How To Be Both. There are two narrative sections to the book – and two versions of the actual novel. Which one you read…Rachel Darling, Research Student in 20th and 21st Century Literature, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.