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The judges of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards are facing criticism for selecting only four fiction finalists this year instead of the usual five and opting to choose no finalists at all in the best first book category.
With calls for an overhaul of the awards coming
from, among others, Booker winner Keri Hulme, organiser Booksellers NZ is under pressure. Still, its members can take some comfort from the fact they are not the only awards administrators in the firing line. Britain's women-only literary prize, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, is also creating controversy. Critics are asking why, given the healthy state of women's writing, there is a need to have a female-only award.
As predicted by the bookies, Rose Tremain won this year's Orange Prize for her "very warm and empathetic" tale of immigrant life, The Road Home, and in a reference to the award's (mainly) male critics, said: "Come on guys, stop grumping."
Tremain is one of Britain's more prominent female novelists but has not previously won a major prize, so was predictably thrilled with this one. "This is a prize which celebrates women's fiction. In this year when A L Kennedy has won the Costa, when Anne Enright has won the Booker and when Doris Lessing has won the Nobel, I think there's a lot to celebrate," she said.
Tremain did not name names, but the "grumping" she referred to has been particularly querulous this year.
The latest round was started in March by writer Tim Lott, who called the prize "a sexist con trick", and asked: "Could the establishment of a men-only prize be justified? "Can you imagine the derision with which it would rightly be met?" He concluded that "the Orange Prize is sexist and discriminatory and it should be shunned".
Lott's comments are nothing new. When the Orange was founded in 1996, Auberon Waugh nicknamed it the Lemon Prize. And academic John Sutherland said it did women writers more harm than good.
Author Alain de Botton asked: "What is it about being a woman that is particularly under threat, in need of attention, or indeed distinctive from being a man when it comes to picking up a pen?"
The disapproval is not limited to men. Writer A S Byatt said the prize "ghettoised" women, and said she has forbidden her publisher from entering her books.
Germaine Greer and Anita Brookner are also critics.
Novelist Kate Mosse, who co-founded the prize, says: "The prize was set up to celebrate international fiction written by women and to get fabulous books by women to male and female readers, and it continues to be really successful in doing that."
Part of its raison d'etre was to encourage women's writing at a time when it seemed to be largely ignored. But five of the last six Whitbread/Costas and the latest Man Booker prize were won by women. So why isn't there a men-only prize? "Because no one has, as yet, put in the time, creativity, effort and enthusiasm necessary to start one up and keep it going," says the Orange Prize website.
But not everyone is taking the furore seriously. Novelist Nick Hornby says the controversy is entirely bogus and "you might just as well complain that tennis star Roger Federer isn't allowed to enter the Grand National horse race."
And writer Susan Hill has joked that she will sponsor a new prize "for a novel written by anyone who was born before 1988 in Budleigh Salterton and who is an only child ... People can have a prize for whatever they damn well like".
- INDEPENDENT