About eight years ago, the Canadian novelist Susan Swan looked into the research about how female writers compared with male ones when it came to literary prizes and coverage. “I thought it was going to be a happy progress report,” she said in an interview. “Instead it was a bad news day.”Books written by women were less likely to be reviewed or win the most prominent book awards, Swan said. But Swan teamed up with a friend who works in book publishing, Janice Zawerbny, in an effort to continue to level the playing field. The result is a new annual prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which starting in 2022 will award $150,000 for a work of fiction published in the previous year by a woman or nonbinary person.

Source: New York Times February 07, 2020 09:56 UTC