Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S1 Ep7: Women's Prize for Fiction at Latitude Festival

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Zing Tsjeng brings you this episode from music and performing arts festival Latitude in Suffolk, we'll be catching up with some of the top female performers from across the weekend, including The Guilty Feminist’s Deborah Frances-White, psychotherapist Philippa Perry, The Griefcast's Cariad Lloyd, comedian Felicity Ward and writer and broadcaster Dr Hannah Critchlow, plus live recordings from the Women's Prize for Fiction's Women Writers Revisited panel event featuring Professor Kate Williams, Scarlett Curtis, Viv Groskop and Bernardine Evaristo. Tune in for their perspectives on a subject that we refuse to overlook - the current state of equality in the arts, plus some fantastic recommended reads from women writers.  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.

This is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. Coming to you from this year's Latitude Festival, a music and performing arts festival set in the beautiful Henan Park in Suffolk. I'm Zing Singh. At a weekend of performances that are as varied and unpredictable as the weather, one thing that is guaranteed is a number of inspiring women ready to share their insights, talents and perspectives on a subject that we refuse to overlook,

the current state of equality in the arts. In between the festival sets by Lana Del Rey and comedy jokes from Catherine Ryan, we catch up with some of the top performers across the weekend, including the guilty feminist Deborah Francis White, psychotherapist Philippa Perry, journalist and writer Viv Groskrop, and comedian Felicity Ward, to name a few. From podcasters to comedians, historians to writers,

find out about the platforms that women are using to get their voices heard. Not only that, but we'll catch up with some of the people. of the bookworld's most exciting writers at the Women's Prize panel discussion at the festival's speakeasy stage, who will champion the female writers that the history books forgot, and tell you why they deserve to be read. More on that in a little while. Women have often been pigeonholed as unfunny and pushed out of comedy, with women still only accounting for 10% of the industry. However, here are three female comedians performing at latitude who are resolutely breaking that mode.

First up is Carried Lloyd, host of the award-winning podcast, The Griefcast, on what podcasting as one of the newest mediums for journalism and storytelling is really doing when it comes to gender equality? For me, anyway, it feels quite gender balanced at the moment, and that might change because obviously traditionally what happens is any new media is gender balance and suddenly all the men are doing it and we're not, and they're getting paid more. How does that happen? Welcome to the patriarchy.

But at the moment, I think the great thing that we're dealing with is the birth of a new medium alongside the birth of easy technology. So when you look at something like filmmaking, which obviously the technology is readily available and it's really easy, but it's an older medium, which is traditionally male dominated, especially when it comes to directors and, yeah, you know, executives.

And I think it's really exciting time to have a new medium that is working at the same time as new technology. So I feel like women are in a really strong position where it's not like you can go, oh, there's no podcast with women, or I grew up listening to all men podcasts. You know, when you write comedy

and all my favorite comedies growing up were full of men and had no female characters because of the time. So yeah, I think it's, I listened to a huge amount of female voices, and I would say pretty balanced. And what I love about podcasting is it's not, you know, the women's voices I listen to aren't necessarily talking about women's issues. It's just, I like those people doing the things that they are doing. Yeah, so I think it's a good time to get into podcasting because the technology is really

readily available for you immediately. But yeah, I feel like women are doing amazing stuff. I think the guests do process things in different ways based on gender, but I'd actually say, as with anything, it culminates with other factors. So I would say the older male guests and the older female guests, I think there's sometimes more of a marked difference. So the older male guests would often say, like, you know, I didn't want to cry or I felt embarrassed about that. But I would say the younger guess is actually, I don't hear that in the vocabulary as much. So perhaps, you know, things are changing, definitely. I think the only thing that...

But then it's interesting because I've spoken to male guests who've said, oh, well, I was very angry because, you know, I'm a man, and that's how I dealt with it. And then I always come back with, well, I was really angry. That was the predominant emotion that I had when my dad died was anger. And I didn't feel like I was dealing with it like a man.

I just felt like I was just... That's how I was dealing. My brother was actually not very angry at all and was sort of happy to be sad and, you know, that was fine. So I think sometimes we assign things personally without realizing that I don't see anger as particularly male emotion

because I have such an anger temper on me. So, yeah, I think, I don't think the way you grieve is affected entirely by your gender, but I think maybe perhaps the way society tells you your gender should be handled is what then affects it. Deborah Francis White is a stand-up comedian and a writer. She's the host of the guilty feminist,

a podcast which has had millions of downloads. Here are her insights on what makes podcasting so good for women and what podcasts she listens to in her downtime. I think podcasting lends itself to comedy because you can uniquely be yourself, so you can have a completely authored voice, and you can decide what's funny to you and your friend or your friends, and then you can put it out there, and that generally will speak to other people.

And you might find a small, dedicated audience, or you might find a larger audience, and you might find your audience builds, but you can tell by the numbers how you're doing because people will say to their friends, you've got to listen to this, you've got to listen to this. People aren't being told by a bus stop.

I think it's just an amazing space for women because there's no bar to entry, like you can just make it. And so that's why I think we've seen a lot of women's podcasts become extremely successful because not a lot is commissioned by networks and stations for women. and so women are finding their own content. Women are thirsty. So I think if you are a woman

and you have an idea or something that you feel isn't being said currently on a podcast, make one. Carrie Ed Lloyd's Griefcast is absolutely brilliant. Elizabeth Day's How to Fail is a show that I don't miss an episode of Yomi and Elizabeth from Slay in Your Lane.

I've got a podcast now which I think is anything Yomi and Elizabeth do is required listening or reading. Rosie Jones, who I just find hysterical. She does the girl to famous a lot. She's brilliant. And her double-up partner Helen Bauer

have got a new podcast called Daddy Look at Me, which I would highly recommend where they talk to people in show business about why. And also, Jess Foster Q has an amazing podcast called Hoovering. Grown-up Land is a Radio 4 podcast, which I have to declare, I did create the format for Radio 4 for that, and I exact produce it.

But it's really, really good. and it did have May Martin, Bishke, and Ned Sedgwick and Steve Alley in it, but because Bisher and May have gone to Telly in Hollywood, then now it has the new season, has Sophie Duker and Heidi Regan in, and they are absolutely phenomenal in it. So check out growing up land as well. Felicity Ward is the final comedian on our interview roster, and here are her thoughts on those important questions.

Does humour have a gender? and do people really still think women can't be funny? As a bonus for our listeners, Felicity also shares an unusual tip for people struggling to read books. I don't think humour has a gender. I think that, again, because, you know, that women were allowed to be on stage so much later that it takes time for nuance to develop and it takes time for ideas to develop. And it also takes time for, you know, there's a friend of mine who was the first, first woman to ever emce the comedy store in London. She's Australian. I don't know if she said

she had something thrown at her and then she ended up having to pour a beer. So you just had to be a, she had to be a particular type of personality to survive then. Now it feels like there's a lot more space for women to be anything that they want to be. And there's a market for it, there's an audience for it, you know, like capitalism is sort of dictating that more women can be on stage and screen too in different variations. I used to be a really avid reader when I was younger and I was a really good reader

and then I don't know what happened but I became very nervous about reading books and very intimidated so why I like reading plays is like double spacing. So you're really turning pages you're like, I am reading this book really quickly. I know it's a play but if anyone is struggling to

re-enter the world of books start with a playmate. Now for two fantastic and very different authors from the science world. Philippa Perry, a psychotherapist and author and Dr. Hannah Critchlow, broadcaster and neuroscientist, an author of The Science of Fate. Philippa was at the festival to talk about her latest book, the book you wish your parents had read, and gave us some advice on dealing with sexists.

How did you change the mind of a sexist who disagrees with you? You can't really. Because arguing, it's just words, and people always have more words to come back with words. But the great thing is to take no notice if that's at all possible. Try not to be too permeable, so don't let it in. And the greatest revenge of all is to succeed. My book is called The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and your children will be glad that you did. It's a book about how to have a relationship with your child or children.

Because what a child needs more than anything else is a relationship that's like a home they feel safe in. A relationship where they can confide anything they want. and a relationship that makes them feel seen and understood because that's what we all need. People have been thinking too much in terms of how to manipulate your kid into being this or that. This is not about that at all. Don't think about moulding your child into this or that shape. just have a to and fro relationship with them. Don't think that you have to make them be something

because who wants to be treated like that? Next up, Dr Hannah Critchlow on how science has historically dealt with accusations of sexism and whether things are improving for modern-day female scientists. Plus, some very interesting recent neuroscience discoveries around gender. Science as a field to get into, hasn't offered, you know, as a profession, it hasn't offered a huge amount of equality based on gender, actually, or race. It's really been the domain of the white middle class, privileged male, traditionally.

But saying that, there's been some absolutely fantastic females who have risen to the top. So, for example, Marie Curie, the physicist, who came up with a theory of radioactivity and helped help develop the x-ray machine. There's Rosalind Franklin, the chemist, who helped discover the molecular structure for DNA. Unfortunately, she wasn't actually recognized for it with the Nobel Prize. There's Ada Lovelace, the mathematician, computer programmer, and Gladys West, who helped the mathematician who helped to invent GPS, as we know it now, and it helps to prevent us getting lost.

So there's some wonderful examples that litter history, showing how few people. females can rise to the top and how they can succeed in science. That said, there's also some very empirical evidence that shows that today, nowadays, so there were some studies published in a top peer-reviewed journal that's ironically called penis. This abbreviation is the Proceeding of National Association of Science. But there was a publication recently that was looking at gender imbalance and limited opportunities for females within specifically science. And so what they were doing was they were asking for applicants or a number of professors. So real professors at academic institutions across the world were asked to review the CVs for a position of a lab laboratory manager.

And what they found was that again and again and again and again the CVs that were male from the male applicants. So they mixed, they randomized the CVs. Some of them were male, some of them were female, and they kept switching them based on who they're, based on who was reviewing them. And what they found was that, generally speaking, the reviewers would rate the male applicants as the ones that should be given the job. And when they were given the job, they were also offered a much higher wage. And this is something that, you know, this is a study that was peer-reviewed, that was statistically significant, and that is, is very recent. It's a study that was published in the last few years.

And unfortunately, another finding from that study is that in particular, it was the female professors that were actually exhibiting the larger bias towards the males. So there's still a lot that needs to be done to change the perception of females in science. And whether it's a question of, I mean, so part of the issue is that at the moment, the grants are given on a short basis. So there might be the time that the allocation for when the grants results have to be in is usually within, you know, two, three, maybe five years.

And a lot of the professors are worried that females are going to get pregnant and go off a maternity leave. And so therefore they're going to lose a year of highly trained individuals not being able to give, the results that they need in order to please the body that gave them the money. So there's a lot of issues really, I think, that need addressing in science and in the science profession to help equal the playing field out. There's been some absolutely fantastic books that have been published recently looking at the gendered delusion, if you like. So one book that I heartily recommend is the gendered brain.

It's by Gina Rippen, who's a professor in cognitive neuroscience, I think, based in Birmingham. And there's also another book by Cordelia Fines called Testosterone Rex, and she's written a couple of other books as well. And they're looking at some of the recent neuroscience findings that are coming out, looking at any proclaimed differences, brain differences between male and female brains. And there's really funny. Gina in particular goes back to where this historical idea came that women are inferior. They have biologically this inferior brain that is only meant for,

compassion and nurturing and can't actually accomplish anything else in any real meaning. And this real idea came from, generally speaking, again, privileged white middle class, upper class males who would go around weighing brains from men and from women and even filling up the skulls with bird seed. And what they found is that on average, women's brains weigh about 140 milligrams less than males. and so they were saying, oh look, well this is a clear, you know, size is everything, size means everything. And so, you know, men are obviously cleverer than women because they have a bigger brain,

so they have much greater capacity for thought. Well, this argument kind of doesn't obviously hold true because you can look at some big, very big, big, big men who have big heads, and they have big brains as well when you look at their brain volume. And they're not always the brightest of the bunch. And then there was also this wonderful mathematical math. mathematician called Alice Lee, who came up with this wonderful formula looking at the volume of brains in 1898. And she used her mathematical formula that she'd come up with and analyzed the volume of different skulls of people. And everyone was applauding her technology and really convinced by it until it gave rise to the fact that actually one of the leading eminent,

anatomists at the time that was thought to be one of the smartest people, actually had the smallest skull size of anyone she'd analysed, as did her supervisor. So certainly everybody was questioning these results. Actually, maybe size isn't everything. And then we skip forward to what's going on nowadays, and we appreciate that, you know, size isn't everything. Actually, it's how the nerve cells are kind of packed together.

Actually, there's a huge amount of overlap across the genders, anyway. And in fact, if you took a brain scan of somebody's brain, you wouldn't really be able to pinpoint whether it was, you know, originating from a male or a female. There is so much overlap between kind of these different characteristics within the brain. But there's still this huge kind of bias, this awful, you know, way that we think of neuroscience, despite the fact that actually there's not a huge amount of evidence to back it up. Professor Kate Williams chaired the Women's Prize for Fictions Women's Writers' Revisited Latitude event and was the chair of the 2019 Women's Prize judging panel.

Kate is an author, broadcaster and professor of history. And here she is on why women being forgotten by history isn't just reserved for authors. Women inventors, women's scientists, women mathematicians and women's female thinkers. And it's for very similar reason. And what you see is often women's discoveries are often dismissed, in the same way that women's writing is dismissed. It's not big. It's not as effective.

And it tends to be, if you think with an inventor, it tends to be rolled up into the work of a man. So, for example, Ada Lovelace, who is this incredible female mathematician, really, we would say she is the mother of the modern day algorithm, which every time you buy something online, and then something else pops up, it's all thanks to her. she was a great friend of the mathematician Charles Babbage but in the end all of her discoveries and what she did

was really absorbed into his life's work that was how history saw her she was excluded and even that she has a stake on history because she was Byron's daughter but still she was excluded and forgotten even though she has a claim to fame that way so we see it throughout history that women contributors of all kinds are ignored and forgotten and I was talking about the

poll of 100 Greatest Britons in 2002 in the talk and the majority of women who are deemed a great Britain that's about 14 I think in the list are queens as Victoria it's Elizabeth but still they are beaten by a lot of men are seen as much greater the top writer was Jane Austen who's at number 70 and beaten by male writers and also various other men including the actor Michael Crawford and boy George and Steve Redgrave and lots and lots of people. So we do have a situation, I think, when female authors have forgotten, and other women have forgotten as well.

And I think there are two reasons. I think one reason is that they often dismissed as domestic at the time. They often ignored. But also there's a narrative that wants to associate, I think, in literature, genius and excellence with men. And so these women who might have come up with ideas themselves have to be erased. So we do have a situation, obviously, that some playwrights or writers might be quite minor. we're having to re-investigate them, we discover them.

But the author I was talking about in the afternoon today at Latitude is one called Eliza Hayward, who was a huge bestseller at the time in the 1720s, 1740s, massive bestseller. A lot talked about, sometimes joked about, sometimes talked about in a very insulting fashion, but she was talked about. And so she was already big. She was big news, but she's been forgotten. and what was also very important to me. Things are improving, and I think what we have to do is be vigilant,

but not letting them go back. Scarlett Curtis is a writer, activist and feminist, co-founder of a group called The Pink Protest, and the curator of a book called Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies. Scarlett also formed part of our amazing Women's Prize panel discussion. She waxes lyrical about one of her favorite authors who introduced her to an unlikely, genre. So my

writer is Octavia Butler who is an African-American science fiction writer. She is she's not forgotten. Like she's a very, very big deal in America but when I was introduced her, I'd never heard of her before. And I think a lot of

English people maybe don't read her as much as they do in America. So I thought it was kind of useful. She's incredible. The books I want to talk about is she wrote this trilogy of books. And I hate something. I never read science fiction.

I really don't like it. And I was working with this activist, and she was like, you have to read these books because they're incredible. And I really hate science fiction. I don't want to read them. And I read all three of them in a few weeks. They are just addictive and incredible. The whole trilogy is called Lilith's Brood, and the first book is called Dawn.

And it's about a black woman called Lilith who wakes up on an alien spaceship 200 years after a war that has destroyed the whole of us. And there's a kind of species of aliens that are waking her up and they've locked her in this prison and they've found her. And it's up to her to, with the aliens, recreate the whole of the human species. And it's just so interesting. And I mean, that sounds pretty far out. But all the books are about race and feminism and humanity and what it means to be humanity. And the basis of the books is that the reason that the human species,

ended was because of this fundamental contradiction at the heart of the human species, which is the mixture of intelligence and a hierarchical nature. And the aliens have basically have been looking at the humans and seen how they've all killed each other because of this hierarchy, because we're always trying to be better. I was in shoes since I was working with an activist in America called Adrian Marie Brown, who's very obsessed with Octavia Butler. And she wrote a collection of essays called Octavia's Brood. which is a lot of modern writers kind of reflecting on how much Octavia Butler meant to them. And she is a really active member of the Black Lives Matter movement that was kind of there really early on in New York.

And she kind of talks about how all feminist activism and any kind of activism is a work of science fiction because you are literally having to imagine a world that doesn't exist anymore. And that's really what I think all of Octavia Butler's books are about is like, looking at activism and feminism and all these as a science fiction and how do you build that. And they're just amazing. There's loads of alien sex in it as well, which is great. That's a plus. Yeah, lots of like suctioning.

And yeah, they're just incredible. A science fiction is the genre is something we associate with men, especially white men, and especially kind of, you know, these very, yeah, masculine books. And this book is just the opposite. that, but it's also like a really great science fiction book. I've given it to loads of young boys because I think on its basis it's just a really exciting, amazing book about aliens, but it's also about all these other issues. Next up, Bernardine Everistow, an award-winning writer just this week longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her latest novel

Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine's recommendation is Bucci Amichetta, a prolific Nigerian-born novelist who refused to adhere to social constructs. She lived in from 1944 to 2010 and she wrote 20 novels. I feel that she's been very much overlooked by the sort of literary worlds in this country. She had a really interesting background. She was orphaned before she was 11. Her father didn't want to have her educated in Nigeria until she forced him to send her to school. She was in an arranged marriage at 16. She had five children by the age of 22, at which point she left her husband because he was violent.

She was raising five children on her own as an immigrant in Britain in the 70s. She was a librarian, a social worker, a teacher, and eventually an academic. But she managed to write all these books from a black woman's perspective, particularly Nigerian perspective, African perspective. And she was all her protagonists were women, and she was always looking at the difficulties that women faced in Nigeria, where they were second-class citizens. And in fact, one of her books was called second-class citizen.

And also in the UK, African women were second-class citizens because they were black. She was realist. Her language was quite straightforward. But she really got inside her characters and told stories, that haven't been told, and I think that's what we're all about, you know, as women writers, as feminist writers and so on. And the book that I'd like to recommend is called The Joys of Motherhood, which is an ironic title, and it's about a young woman like her, who at the age of 16 is sent off in a range marriage in Nigeria. She can't produce children,

so she's relegated to the position of second wife, and her husband takes another woman who produces a son for him. She runs a woman. She runs a woman. way to her father. Her father then arranges a marriage to somebody else in Lagos, in Nigeria, and she then has a child and loses the child, and she goes almost mad, because the role of

women in that society is essentially to have children. And then she has, it sounds like a very miserable book, in a sense it's not a comedy, for sure. Bucci Amachetta was the first person to write about the Biafran War from a female perspective.

And she was one of Granta's best of 20 young novelists in 1983, but she wasn't really otherwise celebrated in Britain or perhaps anywhere in the world. And I feel that she's dead now and that we really need to resurrect her and to acknowledge the greatness of her work in and of itself, but also in terms of where she came from, because she could have been crushed by her background, but actually it fired her on to make a difference in society and to write these stories that nobody else was writing when she was writing. Can you imagine in the 1970s who was getting published, who was being celebrated in this country, and then you get this African woman writing African stories,

and, you know, she was generally ignored by the literary world. And last but certainly not least, Viv Groskopp, comedian and author of How to Own the Room, introduces us to Anna Akhmatova, Russia's equivalent to Virginia Woolf, not just in prominence, but also coincidentally in looks. And I'm wondering if anybody here has heard of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. One person here, two, three, oh, brilliant. Okay, so she's not totally forgotten. She is Russia's equivalent. to Virginia Woolf. And weirdly, she's quite distinctive looking and she actually physically resembles Virginia Woolf. They both have very similar nose. And so born in the 1890s, she comes to prominence in the mid-1910s. So very similar profile, both literally and metaphorically, to Virginia Woolf, as in she's in quite a moneyed set in St. Petersburg, a bit like the Bloomsbury set. She's hanging out with a lot of Bohemian types. She has a lot of connections in Paris

and in the rest of Europe. And she's part of what they call the silver age of Russian poetry, which is around about 1910. And then of course 1917 comes. And because she's from an aristocratic background, she has the opportunity to leave Russia in 1917 because it is not a safe place for a writer to be. And she decides that she can't leave Russia, that she can't leave her homeland, and she's going to stay there. And it becomes a decision that dominates the rest of her life, because once she said that, it turns out that she never can leave. And she enters this period of her career where suddenly her writing is very controversial. So before 1917, she was known as somebody who would write about love, who would write about passion, romance, and suddenly she's

this very edgy figure because she refuses to write on behalf of the regime. So for a time, over the 1920s, she goes fairly quiet. Then through the 90s and 20s and 1930s, things become more and more serious. And they start to arrest people close to her. So they arrest her son, they take him to the camps, they arrest her first husband, her second husband, and her second husband, and they use the people around her as pawns. Because she has become quite a famous figure in European literature in the 1910s. They can't attack her direct because it would make Russia look too aggressive to attack a woman writer like that. So they attack around her and they constantly search her flat for writing

and they try to stop her from writing. And publicly she goes quiet for a very long time. But behind the scenes, she is working on several great pieces of work, which are to be published much later. By 1950s, these pieces of work become public. So after Stalin dies in 1953, we find out what she's been working on for 20 years. And one of the things she's been working on is a poetry cycle called Requiem, which is a beautiful piece of writing.

It's only about 11 pages long. It's like a Shakespearean sonnet. about women who have lost their loved ones to the Gulag system and what it's like to wait. But what's really amazing about her and why I wish more people knew about Anna Akhmatova is the circumstances in which she wrote. She realizes that she can't write anything down

because if she writes on a piece of paper, they find it. They find it, they take it away, and then they use it to imprison people that she knows. so she can't risk writing anything down. So instead, she recruits a circle of what she calls listeners. It ends up being 13 people. And what happens is that she invites these people around to her flat one at a time,

and the flat is bugged, so there's always somebody listening. And she will have a code with these listeners. And so she'll say to them, and she had code words that she would use, She would often say, oh, I think the autumn is coming very late this year. And the person would know that she's about to start writing down a piece of poetry. Then they would go very quiet, and she would start scribbling down some lines of poetry, hand them to the other person and memorize this poetry. Then they would burn the piece of paper in an ashtray.

and that person would have to remember that maybe for 10 years because they couldn't publish it until Stalin died. But eventually this poetry did survive. So it's an incredible testimony to the oral tradition that centuries ago, we would have all been used to memorizing stories and memorizing poetry. And we wouldn't have felt pressured if somebody asked us to do this. And to me, it's extraordinary to think that somebody was

doing that right up to the end of the 1940s within living memory in order to be able to write at all. And here is a final thought from Scarlett Curtis. She tells us about social media and the internet's role in remembering women. I think the internet is definitely already making it harder for important women to be forgotten. I think you see so many incredible websites and Instagram accounts and things like that dedicated to women that don't have a huge following and have been kind of left out of academia and bookshops and everything like that. I think the one issue is like overload. You know, we need to be getting these women out there, not just to the people like me that follow Instagram accounts called like forgotten women from history. You know, we need to be getting

them further than that. But I do already think there are the most incredible things happening online in terms of like reclaiming women's voices from history. I'm Zing Singh and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. recorded live at Latitude Festival. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and help us by leaving a review. It's an easy way to help us reach the charts so more people can find us. As a registered charity, the Women's Prize for Fiction creates opportunities for women to thrive and flourish. And joining the prize's patron circle is one way that you can lend your support. There are various levels of involvement and each and every donation makes a difference. You can find more information

about the benefits on the website, and it's quick and easy to sign up. Just Google, support us women's prize. And a massive thank you, as always, for listening. Until next time.