At the heart of this anomaly is the way in which literature by men and women is received.
In 1991, when the Booker Prize shortlist was announced, it featured no women. It was a year when a significant percentage of books published had been by women; the year when the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to a woman, Nadine Gordimer, for the first time in 25 years. That the statistics were skewed against women was a given but the extent of it troubled several writers, publishers, agents and editors enough to institute an award for women five years later. The Women’s Prize has grown to be one of the most prestigious annual prizes but it is also a reminder of the gendered reading of literature.
The 2024 Booker Prize shortlist, therefore, comes as a happy exception: It has five women on it for the first time in its 55-year-old history — Anne Michaels (Held), Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Samantha Harvey (Orbital), Yael Van Der Wouden (The Safekeep) and Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional). The only man on the list is Percival Everett for James. Over the years, international literary awards such as the Nobel and the Booker have attempted to become more diverse and representative, even though equality seems to be a long way off. Of the 116 Literature Nobels awarded between 1901 and 2023, only 17 have gone to women writers. The Booker Prize, too, has had a similar trajectory.
At the heart of this anomaly is the way in which literature by men and women is received. Women’s literature is seen as what Nobel Laureate and Booker winner VS Naipaul had dismissed as “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world” in 2011 — a smaller canvas against the purportedly wider scope of male writing. Books by women are ghettoised variously as “chick lit” and “women’s writing”, reducing them to subsets of the larger world of male writing. And yet, in their world building or their interiority, there is little that sets apart male and female writers. The difference, then, is only in attitude. As Margaret Atwood once put it: “When a man writes about things like doing the dishes, it’s realism; when a woman does it, it’s an unfortunate genetic limitation.”
