Bereft by Chris Womersley (might I boast, a contributor to KYD issue one)
That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott
When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald

And before I launch into questions and complaints, I should say that I think Bereft is a terrific novel, and while I haven’t read the other two, I’ve heard excellent things from readers whose opinions I rate and respect. So: congrats to all. But …

The second thing you notice? Not a skirt in sight. This is the second time in three years that we’ve had an all-male Miles (or ‘sausagefest’, to quote former Miles judge Kerryn Goldsworthy in 2009). And over the past twenty years, just three women have won the Miles. Which, rather ironically, is of course funded by a woman writer.

In 2009, the chair of the judges, Morag Fraser, said that none of the judges had realised what they had done in selecting the all-male shortlist until after they’d done it. That’s extremely unlikely to have been the case this time. Last year, Sydney Morning Herald literary editor Susan Wyndham wrote, on the occasion of the 2010 longlist announcement, that she’d asked Fraser if they ‘would be careful to include a woman on the shortlist this time’. Apparently, Fraser ‘instantly’ answered with a succinct, ‘Yep’. So, when the judges came up with a three-author, all-male shortlist one year later, they must have been fully aware of (and likely not looking forward to) the reaction they would provoke.

At the ceremony announcing the shortlist, Fraser said that the three books ‘stood out like beacons’ ahead of the rest. I have no doubt that the judges had no explicit anti-female agenda in selecting the shortlist and that this is their honest assessment of what they perceive as the three best novels. I’m sure they had no pleasure in presenting another ‘sausagefest’. But what is going on here?

As Kerryn Goldsworthy said, commenting on Stephen Romei’s blog A Pair of Ragged Claws:

No doubt they are the ‘best books’, but it goes deeper than that. The question is, as it always is when these issues come up, what the criteria are for literary value, and where those criteria come from. The answer is (and it’s the basis of all useful discussion about gender and literature) that they derive from the values of the dominant culture — which circumscribes what women, as well as men, can be, think, believe and say — and the dominant culture is still, well, a sausage fest.

Are women writing lesser novels than men? Are they being published less often than men? Submitting their work less often? Are they, as some commentators have suggested, writing books in the kinds of styles and genres that we don’t value as ‘literary’ or as constituting ‘the best’?

Is it – again – an instance of the idea that when women write about family and relationships, it’s ‘domestic’, but when men do it, it’s literary? (As Siri Hustvedt wryly comments writes in her latest – all-women – novel, The Summer Without Men: ‘Women’s travails of no import? It’s okay when it’s Flaubert, of course.’)

I think it’s interesting that Fiona McGregor’s wonderfully characterised novel about a family in contemporary Sydney, Indelible Ink, hasn’t been shortlisted for any major awards yet, and didn’t even make the longlist of the Miles. I can’t help but compare it to the rapturous reception of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (shortlisted for the Miles), another confronting, compellingly relevant novel about family and connections and the way we live now.

Christos himself was a major champion of Indelible Ink, calling the book ‘tremendous’ and ‘a long time coming’. Other admirers included Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic of The Australian, who called it (in The Monthly) ‘the richest and most complete evocation of Sydney since Patrick White’s The Vivisector’.

Of course they’re different books, and I know, from conversations with some literary taste-makers, that not everyone loved Indelible Ink as much as I did. But still – it’s a comparison worth thinking about (and one far more relevant than Jodi Picoult’s recent attempt to compare the reception of her books to that of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which watered down an otherwise insightful point about the difference in the way male and female writers are received).

As feminist writer Katha Pollitt wrote incisively in The Guardian last year: ‘When men write books about family life – John Updike, Jonathan Franzen – they are read as writing about America and the Human Condition. When women write books that are ambitious, political and engaged with the big world of ideas, they are seen as stories about the emotional lives of their characters.’ I think this applies to Tsiolkas/McGregor.

The one good thing about all this? At least we’re talking about it. And talking can lead to questioning our assumptions and our value judgements – the latter being what awards decisions are based on. After Kirsten Tranter’s Wheeler Centre article in which she pointed out that several state Premier’s Awards shortlists last year included no female fiction writers, novelist and Age books columnist Jane Sullivan reflected on her own decisions as an awards judge:

I was one of the judges (with two other women) who chose one of those shortlists. I believe I did so for reasons free of gender bias, but how can anyone ever be sure of that when bias can be unconscious? Women writers are still battling an ancient legacy of assumptions about literature and what constitutes ‘serious’ writing, and these battles are both external and internal. Thea Astley once said that she found it hard when she first started writing books because she couldn’t actually imagine a man sitting and listening to her for the length of an entire book.

Bravo to her for thinking about it and publicly reflecting on it. Here’s to more discussion.

NOTE: If you’re also up for more discussion, and you’re in Sydney next month, I strongly suggest you roll up to the free SWF event ‘The Count’ to hear Kirsten Tranter, Stephen Romei and Sophie Cunningham talk about the lack of women in the books pages on Thursday 19 May, 11.30am–12.30pm. Sophie Cunningham will write about the underrepresentation of women in literary culture for Kill Your Darlings’ lead essay in Issue Six.

In strictly objective alphabetical order, the longlist is:

Patrick Allington, Figurehead
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues
Jon Doust, Boy on a Wire
Deborah Forster, The Book of Emmett
David Foster, Sons of the Rumour
Glenda Guest, Siddon Rock
Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly
Thomas Keneally, The People’s Train
Alex Miller, Lovesong
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Peter Temple, Truth

While there’s not the very obvious omission of female literary heavyweights that there was last year (when Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Amanda Lohrey and Joan London all missed out), the gender imbalance is still curious, to say the least.

It didn’t take long for Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game and Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath to spring to mind as surprising books to be left off the longlist. And what about Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion? (‘It’s a mystery why Andrea Goldsmith is not a household name,’ wrote Jennifer Levasseur, reviewing the book in The Australian. ‘Her latest offering should be welcomed with the excitement that greets the best Australian novelists working today.’)

There’s a robust conversation about this online already (along with debates about the the interpretation of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’), with some of the best discussions happening in the comments sections of James Bradley’s blog and the blog of Stephen Romei, editor of ALR.

On the latter, former Miles Franklin judge Kerryn Goldsworthy was invited to comment on the gender issue. While she wasn’t particularly concerned about the make-up of this year’s longlist, apart from the omission of Cate Kennedy, she had been among those concerned about last year’s shortlist. She wrote:

The question of who’s writing ‘better books’ always comes down to the criteria that are applied in judging them, and I do think that a lot of the more traditional literary values are still skewed or coded ‘masculine’. Anyone writing a novel about private life, domestic life, family life or emotional life, anyone writing a short novel or a ‘small-canvas’ novel and anyone writing a novel whose main character is a woman (and I don’t mean some male fantasy figure like Lara … erm … Croft, I mean an actual warts-and-all woman) is often automatically, unconsciously disadvantaged in competitions like this, regardless of the quality of the writing. And not necessarily only by male judges, but by anyone who’s been taught to value ‘big’ books about ‘important’ subjects.

The conversation about gender and literary prizes is aflame overseas at the moment, too. Back in November last year, author, critic, editor and prize judge Lizzie Sturnick wrote a frustrated article in response to Publisher’s Weekly’s all-male Top 10 Books of 2009. The Publisher’s Weekly editors had explained the outcome thus: ‘We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration. We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz … It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.’

‘The publishing industry is no better at ignoring gender than your average obstetrician,’ Sturnick acidly responded. Giving an insider’s view from one judging panel she’d been a member of, she said she’d watched as books by men were labelled ‘ambitious’ (which she interpreted as: ‘had shot high and fallen short’), while books by women had been called ‘small’, ‘domestic’ and ‘unambitious’. In a line that has since echoed around cyberspace, she wrote:

‘I just want to say,’ I said as the meeting closed, ‘that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.’

Interestingly, while Sturnick reported her experience of women’s fiction being judged as ‘small’ and ‘domestic’, a judge of another literary prize has come under fire for complaining of women’s fiction as ‘grim’. Daisy Goodwin, chair of the judges for this year’s round of the all-women Orange Prize said:

‘There’s not been much wit and not much joy, there’s a lot of grimness out there … Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing.’

She blamed publishers for ‘lagging behind what the public want’. It’s interesting, I think, that she’s based her analysis on reading the books entered to a major literary prize. It seems likely to me that publishers are basing their choices on what they think literary award judges (like herself) want. Sending in their more ‘ambitious’ books, perhaps?

‘If the books that are entered have been remarkably downbeat this year, it’s perhaps because editors of lighter books by women aren’t confident that they command the same respect as grim ones,’ retorted Jean Hannah Edelstein in The Guardian, remarking that witty, ‘pleasurable’ books by women are often marketed as specifically ‘women’s’ reading, decorated with pink covers and the like.

She went on to say that it was hard to imagine ‘our most beloved, funny female writers of the past’ (like Nancy Mitford) being in contention for The Orange Prize. Goodwin’s admonition for female writers to ‘cheer up, love’, she said, would be unlikely to be directed at a male writer: ‘Debates about who’s going to be the next Philip Roth are not coloured by criticisms of brilliant young male authors for not being cheery enough – I’ve not read any criticism that Legend of a Suicide, for example, lacks joy.’

Another writer, William Skidelsky, agreed with Edelstein, but put another twist on Goodwin’s remarks: she was only speaking the truth, he said. He reported ‘a growing feeling that, in order to be “serious”, novels have to be dark in tone … arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women’s fiction between frothy, commercial “chicklit” and more serious, “literary” work.’ This perception needs to be talked about, he said, as it’s affecting the kinds of books that are written and published.

Amanda Craig, one of the longlisted novelists, told Skidelsy: ‘There really is a sense that women writers have two paths – on the one hand, towards chicklit; on the other, the serious route. And if they take the latter, there’s a feeling that they have to be extra serious in order to be treated with respect.’

It’s an interesting debate. The Orange longlist, in full, is:

Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You
Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
Clare Clark, Savage Lands
Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds
Roopa Farooki, The Way Things Look to Me
Rebecca Gowers, The Twisted Heart
MJ Hyland, This is How
Sadie Jones, Small Wars
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Laila Lalami, Secret Son
Andrea Levy, The Long Song
Attica Locke, Black Water Rising
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Maria McCann, The Wilding
Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Amy Sackville, The Still Point
Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

Last year, there was a flurry of discussion following the all-male Miles Franklin shortlist, dubbed a ‘sausage fest’ by Literary Minded blogger Angela Meyer. It was a year when female heavyweights like Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Joan London and Amanda Lohrey released eligible, critically acclaimed, books that didn’t even make the longlist, let alone the shortlist. Miles Franklin judge Morag Fraser reported that she ‘walked out of our two-hour shortlist meeting without realising what we had done’ and that there were ‘no conclusions to be drawn’ from the outcome. And I’m sure that nobody in that room made a conscious decision to choose an all-male shortlist, but rather chose what they thought were the best books published during the period that met the award criteria, an exercise that will always be somewhat subjective – and the results of which, for Australia’s leading literary prize, will reflect something about the current values of Australia’s literary culture.

Former Miles Franklin judge Kerryn Goldsworthy observed as much on her blog, Australian Literature Diary, concluding that ‘if the dominant culture is a sausage fest, then, well, you know’. Meanjin’s Sophie Cunningham added an intriguing angle to the discussion. ‘What was the problem? Too modest in scope? Too domestic? The undermining of women’s writing involves the use of many such phrases.’ With the exception of Grenville’s The Lieutenant, the other books that were surprisingly left off the longlist could indeed fit these criteria, with their intense focus on relationships and domestic politics. ‘I think at the moment there’s a feeling that women shouldn’t write about domesticity about relationships, or about middle-class concerns,’ the wonderful UK writer Rachel Cusk – whose novels and non-fiction writing intensely explore domestic concerns – told The Book Show last month. Cusk recently wrote an article for the Guardian about this feeling: ‘Women … might cease to produce “women’s writing” not because they are freer but because they are more ashamed, less certain of a general receptiveness, and even, perhaps, because they suspect they might be vilified.’

It’s a fascinating and complex debate, and one we should continue to have, to keep us evaluating and thinking about the kinds of writing we value in our culture and why – or why not. Of course, I think both women and men should be able to write about any subject they fancy. But I also think that some of the best writing – in my subjective opinion – is that which examines human nature, human relationships, the intricacies of how we live our lives, and mirrors them back to us so we can better understand ourselves. And as domestic life will always be an area ripe for that kind of examination, I fervently hope that our most talented writers don’t feel obliged to steer away from that arena for fear of not being taken seriously.