Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S1 Ep4: Women Writers Revisited

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

Fiction + Forgotten Talents. Join Zing Tsjeng for this week's Baileys Book Bar, a one-off live version of Women’s Prize for Fiction’s hugely popular new online feature Women Writers Revisited. The panel of exceptional women will discuss the overlooked or ‘forgotten’ female writers who have inspired them. Bestselling author and our Founder Director Kate Mosse is joined by 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction judge, journalist and theatre critic Arifa Akbar, previous winner of the Women’s Prize Linda Grant, and the beloved novelist Joanna Trollope. Books covered: The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer Whatever Happened to Interracial Love by Kathleen Collins The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay For more details head over to www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk or check out #WomensPrize and @WomensPrize on Twitter and Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, produced by Fremantle. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh, at the Bailey's Book Bar, Wardstone's Tottenham Court Road, London. I've left the busy street outside and come into the space we all know and love, the space that's full of beginnings, endings, endings, action, love. of the bookshop. Last episode's Bailey's cocktail glasses are ready again to be filled up to go along with

tonight's discussion. Women Writers Revisited, a one-off live version of Women's Prize for Fictions, hugely popular new online feature. Today's panel of exceptional women are discussing the overlooked or forgotten female writers who have inspired them. 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction Judge, journalist and theatre critic Arefa Akbar, previous winner of the Women's Prize, Linda Grant, and the beloved. novelist Joanna Trollope.

Hosted by bestselling author and Women's Prize founder-director Kate Moss, I, for one, cannot wait for them to get started. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello! How lovely to see so many of you here. And what we're doing tonight is to

celebrate writers, women writers, who we believe should be more known now. And to have a little bit of a conversation about how it is that some writers go out of fashion and get lost. Another the writers stay on the shelves. So I'm going to start with you, Linda. You've chosen a book to talk about an author. So can you just say a little bit about you and then also why you've

chosen this author? Well, I've written just about to publish my eighth novel. I'd been writing fiction since God. I think 1996 was my first novel was published. And my second, when I lived in Modern Times, won the Orange Prize in the year 2000, and that was an absolutely life-changing event, so Kate and I go back a long way. I've chosen Penelope Mortimer as the Pumpkin Eater. Now, it's published by, as Penguin Modern Classics, you might think, well, she's not that forgotten. But if you look at her backlist, only one other work of hers is in print, and that's published by Persephone. So I want to say a little bit about how I came across, came to the Pumpkinita. It was published in 1962 and I was 11.

It was a novel about trapped housewives in arid marriages who felt that their lives were being battened down by fate and circumstance. And at the age of 11, obviously I wasn't going to be reading that. Penelope Mortimer, she was born in 1918, which was the same year as my mother. And I had sort of written her off as my mother's generation. She had several partners, but she wound up married to the playwright and barrister John Mortimer. And they had, of Rumpole of the Bailey. And she had, though not all with him, six children. And they formed a sort of, you know, fact.

actionable household in the London literati, what we would now call the Metropolitan Elite, which I longed with all my being to be part of. And she was somebody who I certainly knew about, and I was aware of, but I'd never actually read her. And I was partly put off by the title, The Pumpkin Eater. I have no idea what it meant. It didn't seem to mean anything. and in February I went into my local bookshop and I picked it up and I thought after all these years, I mean nearly 60 years, maybe it's time I should read this. You only read it this year?

I read it in February for the first time. So what does the title mean? Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well. and that is the novel. The novel is about a woman in stifled by her marriage, a womanizing husband. This was quite clearly autobiographical.

What is remarkable about this novel is that it is a feminist novel really when the women's movement didn't have that name. And there were a lot of novels about women who were suppressed by marriage, dissatisfied, trying to escape from it. And why should this novel be better than any others? Well, I think it's partly because of the extraordinary quality

of Penelope Mortimer's writing. And there is absolutely nothing which is sentimental about her. She is an acid, sharp, pointed woman who is thinking the whole time And then I went looking for more and discovered that she was a literary celebrity as part of a literary celebrity couple. And she was very famous for a while. But the moment that she split up with John Mortimer and ceased being part of a literary couple, then I think she was forgotten. Now, I spoke recently to a literary journalist who has been trying to.

to get publishers interested in a biography of her. I mean, when I say she slept with everyone, she slept with some pretty famous men. She had a most extraordinary life. But in her later years,

she was forgotten. She went to live in the countryside. She wrote her a memoir on autobiography which sold very well. Then she wrote a sequel and that didn't sell and then she couldn't get published and she died pretty much forgotten apart from her by her children you've talked about the long

process of finding your fictional voice which in your case means an interesting mix of identities you're Jewish you're from Liverpool you're considered middle class given that the prize is so international what kind of advice would you give other young writers are looking to incorporate different facets of their identity into their writing well I suppose never think that other people aren't interested. In 1998, I wrote a memoir about my mother and her dementia. And so many people contacted me and said, this is my story, even though the story was completely different. But the story was that of a mother and a daughter, of people who felt that they were, you know, alienated, you know, fractious. So it was a Jewish story, but at the same time, it seemed to kind of, you know,

connect with many other people. So I think that you tell a story which is particular, and out of the particular comes the universal, comes the general. How do you write? How do you concentrate? I've heard that you need intense solitude in order to write. Yeah, I never, ever, ever working cafes. I don't even read in cafes. And I had an hour to kill this morning. And I was sitting in a cafe and I was looking around. There are about six people on their MacBooks. And I was reading about the same sentence over and over again. I don't know how people can do it. I have to have silence. Don't write with any music in the background. Don't like traffic noises. I just don't like sounds because I need hear the voices that are in my head.

How do you, I guess, negotiate the internet? Are you ever tempted to go online and distract yourself? Oh, my God, yes, yes, yes. I mean, I'm on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And Twitter, I really use more for sort of things like, you know, public events, politics, what's going on in the news. I never wanted to do Twitter, but my publishers said I should. and then I sort of got completely addicted to it

but I try to kind of keep it to a minimum but I try to leave that to lunchtime sort of between from between starting work and lunchtime I like to try and make a gap Are you never tempted, do you write on your laptop Are you never tempted to open twitter.com? Yes, I'm very tempted and I have fallen into temptation in the past

but I try and do it less and less I think that's something that a lot of people listening can relate to the procrastination possibilities offered by social media. I'm going to ask you, Aretha, to talk about your choice, and then Joanna, and then we will all weigh in. So I came across Kathleen Collins about a couple of years ago, when she had her first book published in 2016, three years ago, I was on the literary desk of the independent newspaper at the time, and I just came across this book, and I thought, who is this woman? And there was a bit of a stir around her, this Kathleen Collins character. And I thought, who is this? This is a woman I've never heard of before.

And of course we hadn't because Kathleen Collins was sort of, she was more than one thing. She lived in the 1960s and died at the age of 46. It was 1988. And she died in the middle of this creative outburst. And she was making films. She was an activist. She was a race activist, civil rights activists. She was a filmmaker. She was a short storywriter.

But, you know, she died of cancer at the age of 46, so it was all emerging. It was all sort of formulating and best laid plans. And she died with lots and lots of unfinished work. In her lifetime, she made a film that was groundbreaking in its own right. It was called Losing Ground. And it was, you know, she's a black American woman making a film in the 1960s. And that was a big deal. and she was at the forefront

and that film made waves for that reason alone that she got her film out there and it wasn't easy in the 1960s on that cusp of the civil rights movement and so, you know, at the 80s she died 46 and she left a whole load of unfinished drafts and, you know, almost novels and the richness of the incomplete works

which I found moving in itself. And so there it is, is. It's a book that landed on my desk. Whatever happened to interracial love is a collection of short stories and this is just the tip of the iceberg I'd heard of the work she'd left behind. And so I had to read of it and I thought it was going to be a work of its time and, you know, of her age and of that developmental process. Here was a woman who was, you know, doing lots of things and developing in lots of of ways, but actually these stories struck me as really complete. But what struck me most was how contemporary the voice was. That's really what struck me. Because it was contemporary. It's sort of a

delicious satire on race and identity and love too. It's not just that she's really talking about, you know, race in the 1960s. She's talking about something much bigger, grander. She writes love very cynically and very romantically at the same time, which is a hard thing to navigate to be able to do both. It was only when her daughter was going through all her tons and tons of paperwork in 2006 that she actually discovered the short stories. She discovered an unfinished

novel. So the short stories came out as a collection, you know, 2016, and last year in America, they screened the film. There's been lots of other finished unfinished work that's been published in America under the title of Notes from a Black Woman's Diary, which I really want to read.

What struck me is, in a way it makes, I understand why she was forgotten because she was, you know, death interrupted, the sort of, I'm sure, the amazing trajectory, the literary trajectory. So that's one reason. But, you know, someone like Zadie Smith, who's read, Kathleen Collins is a big fan,

says that it's a sort of, it's shameful that somebody so talented was forgotten. And that's what I remember thinking, like, why isn't you remembered? You know, lots of people die before their time. Lots of brilliant writers die before their time. They're not forgotten so thoroughly forgotten. So I'm interested to talk about how we forget some and not others. You've been in the literary world for years now. Have you seen any changes in the experience for women in that world?

Yeah, you know, I've got to take my hat off to the literary world to the degree that I'm seeing more books being written by women, more books being reviewed in the books pages of newspapers and magazines, and more book critics who are women and significantly literary editors or people that are in charge of curating pages and curating reviews. Yeah, it's improved. I still think it's got a very long way to go, but there has been change, and it's an undeniable change,

and I think there's a momentum, everything's added to it, the fact that people have been beating the drum for more women in literature for so long, more women across the board on higher levels, organizing literary festivals, organizing literary pages, getting publication, all of it across the board. and you are seeing, I'm seeing signs of, I'm also seeing, and I think it's because I've just judged the price this year, I'm seeing such strong stories by women.

I'm kind of staggered by them this year. I think the best books I've read are by women by far this year, so there's something happening, there's some sort of creative pulse, you know, that it's a moment, I think, when women's literature is very strong. Maybe women have a lot to say in. this moment. But I don't think it's just a case of I've got a lot to say. These writers have a lot to say. It's that they're saying their stories in such interesting and original ways. They're being bolder and more

experimental. So I suppose that's the change I've seen. And of course there are other things that haven't changed at all that people still tend overwhelmingly. And when I say people, I mean men overwhelmingly tend to buy books written by men. And when you do look at, you know, when you look across the board at, and things like the Vida survey, you see that women still are, there isn't a 50-50 ratio on books pages and the people that are writing these reviews, the books that are being reviewed. It's still not equality on the books pages. So on the one hand, you know, there is so much more to fix. And on the other hand, I feel something. things have changed in the years that I've looked at books pages and books.

What do you think readers can do to support and amplify the voices of women writers beyond just buying their books and reading them and recommending them to friends? I suppose they can, well now we have this culture where people can leave their own reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. And I think if you bang on about that, you know, and if you express yourself online or anywhere else, a sort of word of mouth is powerful, I think. It can be powerful. I think you can support, you know, the writers you love by turning up to book festivals and events and being present and being in the room. And I suppose that's one way of supporting other women that you think are

brilliant writers. And I think, you know, in a way, remember the days where you'd send a fan letter and say, I really love your work. The nature of writing fiction can be quite solitary. You have to draw on all your inner strengths. And I wonder if just writing, you know, to your writers or to their publishers and saying, you know, I loved your book, I bet that's really gratifying. And I bet that's quite important to writers as well. That is one thing that a lot of publishers want.

They want good Amazon reviews because it means the algorithm picks up the book can recommend it to more people. And I suppose it's sad that we're now, you know, in this world of algorithms having power, having so much power over the success of a book. But then I guess you can, if you like a book, go with it and leave two sentences saying this was a fantastic read. And I suppose those reviews do, people do, people are influenced by them. So it's worth, it's worth taking 10 minutes or 5 minutes just to write something.

And I'm going to recommend somebody who none of you here will ever have heard of her. And her name was Rose McCauley. And this is her last novel, The Towers of Trebizond. And it is utterly, utterly brilliant. And it's the best thing that she wrote, I think, in terms of fiction. But she was a complete literary lioness in her day. She worked a great deal for the BBC And she counted among her friends

Virginia Woolf who was very, very waspish about her Because of her sales exceeded Virginia Woolf's sales While she was alive And she was also rather plain And Virginia Woolf was never very kind about anybody who was very plain So E.M. Forster was a friend. Rosamond Lehman was a friend, Ivy Compton Burnett, T.S. Eliot. On and on, she went.

And she was on endless committees. She was a witness at the famous Radcliffe Hall trial for the Well of Loneliness, which was probably the first cause-selebre lesbian novel ever written. And this novel, The Towers of Trebizond, is really... It's an extraordinary book. It's a travel book. It's also extremely funny. It's intensely lyrical.

It's a love story. It's got polemic about the rights of women in it. It's got polemic about the Catholic versus the Protestant, the Anglican church in it. It's very, very contemporary. It's extremely witty as well. It's got some extraordinary scenes and characters in it. But I think the reason that's... she has fallen out of favor that nobody knows about Rose McCauley now is because she left the

Catholic Church. She was born a Catholic and she was a very freewheeling rather sort of grand bohemian Catholic of her time. But she left the Catholic Church because she fell in love with her well he was an unfrocked priest but he was married her cousin Gerald and she not only fell in love with him she committed tremendous adultery with him constantly whenever she had a choice she says you know she frequently chose adultery over everything else on earth and um she she I think there was a, you know, the Tars of Trebizond was published in 1956 when there was a great need to be deeply, deeply respectable. And, you know, curtain twitching and what will the neighbours say?

And it seems totally ludicrous now, but I think that's why she's fallen out of fashion. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish Cream. Bayleys is proud to shine in light on women and their achievements by getting more books written by truly remarkable. women into the hands of more people. Bailey's is the perfect adult treat, whether in coffee, over ice cream or paired with your favorite shortlisted book.

And now, back by popular demand, discover somewhere in a bottle with Bailey's strawberries and cream. Joanna, tell me about your writing process. What are the ingredients that nourish you creatively? Oh, I think just life. You know, something I might have overheard on the bus or in a supermarket queue or anything. It's what, the theme for each book is what I feel is the zeitgeist, what is preoccupying people at the moment.

So, for example, about two novels ago, it was women and work. You know, there's novels about women in relationships eternally, but there's never any about women and work, women in work. And what work does for women. and, you know, the enormous sense of identity it gives us as it's given men for two and a half thousand years. Do you keep a notebook on you, or do you just foul things away for further notice? I just know when it's right.

Right. Well, I've been writing since the dawn of time, since long before you were in your pram. So, you know, I just, I'm experienced enough to know what it's like now. What does it feel like when you overhear something that you think could be the seed or something, is it kind of triumph? It's partly triumph, but it's mostly relief.

I just think, oh, that's it. That's brilliant. Does it ever work if you go out searching for inspiration, or does it not work it, or if you're going out seeking it? No, it wouldn't work like that at all. It's a question of just waiting until the next idea presents itself to me. And it's always then an extraordinary moment. And then I build on that for the research.

and I always do massive, masses of research in order that any reader doesn't think, oh, she doesn't know what she's talking about. You know, there's never been a 1530 from Kings Lynn to London or whatever it is. You just have to get it right. Have you ever been tempted to tweak a detail just because it didn't quite fit in with the plot?

No, no. No. It's got to fit. It's more like a journalist almost, making sure the facts are correct. It is. Absolutely. because it's got to be real because I don't mind what people think about the characters, I don't mind how they react to them as long as they believe that they're real.

So if somebody says, I can't bear X, that's absolutely fine by me as long as they believe in their reality because the characters in books, you can be as fond of them or as exasperated by them as you are by people in real life. So you've talked about drawing inspiration from people,

you're over here in supermarkets, bus stops, but how do you practice the skill of observation? If you are someone listening right now and you want to start doing what you're doing to gain inspiration for a novel, artistic work, how would you suggest they go about practicing that skill? You have to train yourself to notice what other people do and give away when they don't think

they are. And for my generation, I would say a notebook. For your generation, you can do it on your phone. You can just take notes on your phone. But it's a question of really building up a kind of scrapbook of observingness. So it could be practice writing paragraphs, descriptions. It could be snatches of conversation you've over. heard. It could be bits of poetry that seem to you brilliant. I would say a scrapbook, because I can put in the scrapbook, for example, reproductions of paintings I particularly love. Anything that makes you think what it's like to be someone else, not always about yourself, because that always seems to me, if you really want to have emotional intelligence,

you must try and visualize what it is like to be someone else. One of the things we're doing on the Women's Prize for Fiction website is we're doing a women-writers' revisited thread for precisely this, looking at some extraordinary writers who've disappeared. And it partly came from, I did a documentary earlier this year, on an Ulster Scots, as she always described herself, writer called Helen Waddell. who was a superstar in her day

and published one book in 1933 called Peter Abelard, which was the story of a love affair, probably the most famous love affair in French literature. And she was the biggest author in the world between the wars. How many of you have heard of Helen Waddell? Yeah, well, Jen works for the women's prize. I would be quite upset if she wasn't paying attention. But it led me down an alley, I suppose, well, you know, not a blind alley, but I hope a questioning alley, which is why we were so grateful that you would come and do the same. To ask these questions, what is it that makes one author's work live on after they've gone and somebody else has been lost? And then a series of questions, is it taste? Is it being kept in print? And if it's being kept in print, how does that happen?

Is it a publisher's responsibility? Is it a family's responsibility? So just asking those questions. So just throwing some of those thoughts out. And the biggest question for me was, does this happen to women more? You know, what is the issue about legacy and gatekeeping and who we decide are the classics of tomorrow?

So I'm just throwing some of those thoughts out and I would just love you to start sharing your thoughts about that. I think it probably happens more to women, but it happens to men too. As a journalist, I came across, I reviewed a beautiful book written by a man, William Melvin Kelly, that a New Yorker writer discovered from 1962. It was called a different drummer, just discovered last year, and it's magnificent, and it was forgotten, and it was big in its time, it fell out of fashion, and we've had other rediscovered,

men and women. I think I wonder, I mean, in terms of Kathleen Collins, I think she did so much and she was perhaps writing at a time where she was writing about her world, but in a strange way, she talks to us more now. So I suppose I'm answering a question by saying, why is she rediscovered? and what's the relevance now. She almost chimes. Her voice chimes more now than it happens.

So she's now more in taste than maybe she was. Well, no, I think she's... Wasn't she overshadowed by James Baldwin and things when she was writing? And all of the... That crew was largely male and she was a woman, you know, American and African civil rights activists doing many things. But the time you're born is of enormous importance. I mean, you think that Jane Austen's...

first two books had to be published simply by a lady. She couldn't say. And George Elliott had to pretend to be a man the way that the Brontys all had to pretend to be men. So that is very dictatorial of, you know, the culture of the time, isn't it? And perhaps their voice is better suited to now, many decades on from, you know, they're forgetting. And this reminds me of, you know, the Netflix. series, dear white people. She's got such satire. It reminds me of Jordan Peel's film Get Out. You know, this really clever wit and satire on race and identity. You know, she talks about in

the titular story about integration being in the air, it's, you know, pulsating in the air. Integration was a sort of fashion thing in 1963. They thought they'd done away with racial inequality. So from where we're standing, we see that satire more clearly. aren't we? Because they didn't do, in the year of 1963, America didn't do a way with racial inequality. They just felt, you know, here it says everyone

who is anyone will find at least one Negro to bring a loan home for dinner. You know, it was the year when you embraced blackness and integration and then it faded away. But that talks more to us today in some ways because we know what happened. So that's interesting.

So actually before her time, not after, Linda, you. I've thought a lot about the careers of two contemporary women writers who were related to each other, and that's Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt. And it's very, very interesting because Margaret Drabble, who started first, although she was the younger, she's had a very long career, and she has now written her last book. But very early on, she was blighted by being called the novelist of Hampstead Adultery, now, which is the most incredible put-down

because I've read pretty much all of her novels and not a single one is set in Hampstead. And in fact, I asked her that. What about the Arga Saga then? Well, yes, exactly. Precisely. You know, which has been an absolute curse. Exactly.

Chick-lit, Argus saga, Hampton, Adultery novels. As far as I can remember... Dan Graham for girls. Yes, Dan Bram for Girls. Actually, I don't mind that too much. Only one of her novels is about adultery, and that's Jerusalem the Golden. But it's not adultery between couples. It's adultery between a very young girl and this glamorous, older, married man.

And so I think that her career has partly been stymied by this condescension. But I think it's been stymied by something else as well, which doesn't apply to her sister, which is. and I asked her this when I met her a year ago and she confirmed it she has never has allowed her books to be put forward for prizes and prizes are how careers are made and how prizes are how careers

writers live people say you ask this question how did it feel to win the orange prize and it's sort of such a people want such a metaphysical answer, but the answer is, well, actually, you know, what does it mean? It means sales, it means your books are still in print. And it's staying in print, which is crucial to women writers' careers, or anybody's career. So what I think happened in the 1970s, which brought so many writers back

from the dead, was the founding of Virago Press and the Varago Modern Classics. Yes, absolutely, yeah. And suddenly we were inundated with these novels, these writers that we had never heard of. And some of them didn't stand the test of time and some of them did feel quite dated. And others found a permanent readership. But if you think about two writers, two women writers who have completely forgotten, three actually now think about it. and we'll discover much later by luck, and that's Molly Keene, Barbara Pinn, and Why is I guess, S-O-C? Why is I named? Gene Reese. Gene Reese. All three women were rediscovered in old age, and that works which had not been published went into print. And these, to me, are three really leading women novelists, three leading novelists. I think, this happens to men as well. I don't know there's any question that it does, but people become

forgotten, partly because their work no longer resonates. It just doesn't kind of chime anymore. But when I read The Pumpkin Eater, I thought, what a brilliant stylist she was. And she's writing out of this, you know, this world of, you know, women struggling, trying to struggle with what is my identity. Am I a mother? Am I a wife? am I an autonomous person? And those stories don't seem dated to me. One of the principles of the Women's Prize for Fiction was the word I said at the beginning,

honouring women's work. So one of the things that was very clear when we were researching to set up the prize was that in that year, 60% of novels published were written by women. So there actually wasn't problem, access to the market, as it were. But if you were the 9% of novels

ever shortlisted, for literary prices were by women. So what there was was a sense that literature with a capital L, which remains in printed on the shelf, is written by those people about these things. And there was a clear sense that when women wrote domestic, it was Aga Saga, Chicklet, all the labels that, you know, we have... But Virginia Woolf said it is a great mistake

to believe that there is more significance in great things than in small things. Absolutely. And so when we were setting the prize up Every man has got a family Yes, but actually the thing for the prize was that novels that were domestic written by men were seen as the Great American

novel. So it wasn't whether it wasn't actually the subject matter, it really was the name on the tip. So I think that is something It's absolutely key how we receive books. I think you're so right. So we often receive women's

literature as domestic and to do with the intimate and emotional and personal. And this year's list, I think, has got a few State of the Nation novels on. But they're through the prism of marriage, but they are state of the nation novels. They're talking about big things, but through married life.

But picking up on Linda's point about publishing, this issue of staying in print. Do we think that this will be less difficult now there is access to anybody to any print and you can keep things in through self-publishing and internet or do we still feel that

in the end it's this that keeps a writer in the public gaze, you know, books on a shelf that you can stumble across and fall in love with. I mean I do read, and I don't know very much about publishing but I do read that sales of back lists

are very, very poor that people want to read the new book, you know, the new book that's on the blogs that's in the review pages and they're not reading back lists in a way that I certainly did when I was in my teens and 20s. It didn't bother me that, in fact,

I very rarely wrote a novel when it came out because I couldn't afford a hardback. So I just wonder if, you know, if we're... Well, there weren't paperbacks in the early did. No, just after the war, there was

only things called reprint, the reprint. society. There were no paperbacks at all. I have to sound a note of hope though because I think there's something in the air about revisiting, remembering women's work. Yeah, there's a new bookshop called the Second Shelf, which has a magazine attached to it, which is about forgotten women's books there on the shelf for you to buy. You know, the Paris Review, I know, does a column once a month about

forgotten women's, you know, remembering the... And there's all of them. Yeah, people that are interested in turn up. And, you know, growing up we had, I had in London, Silver Moon Bookshop, and Stephanie. And then they sort of went away, they melted away. And I personally feel there's something about...

There's something that, you know, people are more interested now in women. Just because I see the second shelf are set up, it's a new bookshop in Soho this year, just because the Paris Review's column is new. I mean, maybe it's sort of misplaced hope, but I'm sort of hoping that there is some sort of interest and curiosity. Well, I think it goes back to something quite fundamental, which is that we all learn more about life from fiction

than we do from any other thing except living life itself. Yes. And therefore the appetite for reading for fiction You know, you're going to find something that suits you, aren't you? You're going to find a voice you like. There was an interview the weekend with Brett Easton Ellis, where he famously said, you know, millennials don't read. As Will Self had said, millennials don't read.

And the answer came back, we don't read you. Yes, yes. And in fact, he hadn't read Sally Rooney. He said, oh, no, no, no, I heard about it, but I haven't read it. He actually had no idea what was going on in content. Do you remember when I was setting the prize up and doing a lot of going to be, have oranges and rotten eggs thrown at me, sort of conversations, and I was on a panel with a very famous male novelist who will remain nameless.

I'll find out later. You're all about it. And I said, well, just tell me what novel by a woman have you read recently? And there was a beautiful silence. I said, but any novel, can you think of any novel? And in the end, he could think of Jane Austen. And this is not an argument. This was, I was genuinely interested.

And I said, so why don't you, that, you know, why haven't you read any books by women? He said, books for women are not for me. Yes, exactly. So this was an interesting thing. So back to the idea of revisiting, this idea of who books are for, Is this, are we put off by jackets? Or because we haven't heard of them?

How do we make a legacy? I don't think that the pumpkin eater was for me. I mean, I didn't think it was for me because I wasn't interested in trapped middle-aged housewives at the age of 16. I wasn't interested in that at the time. But later on, I came to see what a brilliant writer. She was the best brilliant depictor of marriage.

And, you know, it's absolutely true that people say it's not for me. But it is cultural, isn't it? Because after all, men of my generation always say to me, of course, you know, the wife's got stacks of your books by the bed, but I only ever read non-fiction. Yeah, military history. Military history.

Yes, exactly. I think men are surprised by actually. I remember a builder who came around and he saw all my books and then he started talking about books and he said, you know, the most surprising thing I bought a girl on a train. And, you know, I was interested in it, you know, because he's so aware that this was a book. He had just decided that this was a book that he couldn't relate to because it was by a woman. You know, he picked it up.

And lo and behold, he'd enjoyed it. But we did a huge piece of research, the biggest piece of research that's been done into gender and reading actually still. But back in 2000, I mean, and one of the people who came out in it was in the survey quite often was, Ian McEwen and that one of his novels sold worse than any other one because it was called endless love and he said from henceforth I shall always write books

with a helicopter on the jacket but it's that so would anybody like to ask a question or to make a comment about what you've heard? Lady there, thank you very much. I found it interesting what you were saying about women authors in the past

be known by their initial but it's still happening now, J.K. Rowling. I mean, I've actually read that with her that she was advised not to be known as her first name, which is just ridiculous. The second thing I wanted to say was about Penelope Mortimer. She suffered from the fact that her husband's second, or I don't know if it's his second wife, but his next wife was also called Penelope. And there was a lot, well, people thought she was in this life with Mortimer

and was she writing books and they didn't realise it was two separate wives and I think that a lot of people didn't realize she existed because there wasn't the same press then as there is now and Google and all the rest of it. Thank you. Question at the back just to finish your... Quick question then.

I just wondered or would be interested to know what all of your hopes are for the women's prize for fiction and whether you think there will ever be a day where it will just be a prize for fiction. or whether in having a women's price for fiction means that it in some ways makes it harder to get women to be seen on the same level as male writers because people are so happy that they say well the women's price for fiction kind of takes care of it so we don't need to push more well I will answer that very quickly I think that's probably the easiest thing is that it was

there are two ways of being in the world really if you see there's a problem you can moan about it or you could do something about it. When we were setting the prize up, it was very straightforward. A lot of the criticism was if women were any good, they'd be on the real prizes. And then the other one was we don't want to segregate women off because then it means that

people put the women over there and it doesn't matter. But the simple truth was that women's work wasn't being celebrated as much as men's work. So you either moan or you do something, so this is what we did. And what I would say about the prize is that it's not a question of need.

authors need prizes but nobody else needs a price it's about celebrating and it's about getting works out there and the women's prize is I you know I can say pretty confidently after you know all these years is one of the most it is the biggest celebration of women's voices anywhere in the world that happens on an annual basis it is the most successful prize at selling its long list and shortlist I seem to say booksellers love it and it and what matters about that is that that is readers hearing about the work by women. And it is collegiate. It is looking out to men and women. It is celebrating women. And it is saying very clearly that women's work is for everyone. Our line, if you like, is written by women for everyone. And actually, I think in these times,

more than ever, celebrating the best for everyone is needed now more than ever. So it's not, that is my sense of the women's prize and why I think it will carry on being very successful prize because it brings readers to books and that's the purpose of the prize so whatever you read

enjoy it and if you don't try one of the books on the short list try another one and if you don't like it put it down and try another one because we're building we hope the classics of tomorrow for today so now the Bailey's ice cream is ready thank you all very much for coming

thank you to Joe Anna Trollock to Areva Akvam to Linda Brock. As you can hear from the background noise, we've got the audience filing out enjoying some Bailey's ice cream and treats. I think I'm not alone in feeling like I've learned a lot about forgotten female authors tonight. I definitely have about a dozen more names

to put on the list of books that I absolutely must check out. I might actually even buy some of them tonight. Might as well, since I'm in a bookshop. I'm Zing Singh, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, produced by Fremantle here at the Bailey's Book Bar. Click subscribe so you don't miss a single episode and to help us support and honour the authors

you've heard from and about, please rate and review this podcast. It helps more listeners and readers find us. Thanks for listening.