Gender Matters

Last week the feminist publishing house Virago celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Sarah Dunant wonders whether much has changed for women in the arts, media and politics since then. Listen to her Point Of View podcast here . First broadcast on BBC Radio4 05/07/13.

Our First Anthology!

We’re thrilled to announce that Words And Women are to launch an anthology of women’s prose writing in partnership with Unthank Books under its new imprint, Unthank Cameo. 

The anthology will feature winning entries from a new prose competition to be launched by Words And Women later this summer.  Open to women writers based in the East of England over the age of 16, the competition offers a cash prize of £600 as well as publication.

The partnership with Unthank Books to produce a high quality collection of women’s regional writing is an extremely positive and welcome development for us.

We will post more details at a later date. In the meantime click here for info on the splendid Unthank Books.

I’m Not Dead Yet

Malca Schotten exhibited her work at Words And Women’s drawing exhibition in The Forum, Norwich, in March this year, and we’re pleased to say that this opportunity has enabled her to strike up a great relationship with The Forum, The Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library, and BBC Voices. All are supporting her with her on-going project  - I’m Not Dead Yet – where she invites older people to sit for her and creates larger than life portraits of them.

Now, with funding from Arts Council England and others, Malca will create up to a dozen fresh portraits of older people from Norwich. A group of student film-makers from BBC Voices will film the process and record the conversations between Malca and her sitters. This work will be exhibited in October this year, and we hope to keep you up-to-date with her progress over coming months. 

Gender Balancing The Books

 “It's less than 100 years since women got the vote in the UK. It's just 170 years since the Brontës were writing with men's names. Changing laws is one thing, changing attitudes is quite another.” – Stella Duffy

An interesting article  by Alex Clark in Saturday’s Guardian which explores the UK literary culture, comparing male and female book reviews and authors. Click here for the article in full.

Martineau/Smith/Publishers

Harriet Martineau was the daughter of a Norwich textile manufacturer, born in 1802, and was one of the leading thinkers of her generation. She was a prolific writer and published twenty-five didactic novels in a series called Illustrations of Political Economy; the first sociological research text, How to Observe Morals and Manners; three volumes on her field work in the United States, Society in America; and a book on her research in the Middle East, Eastern Life: Present and Past. Ali Smith, one of our best living writers - and a woman, and living and writing in the East of England! - chose Martineau as her subject for the inaugural Norwich UNESCO City of Literature Lecture in May this year. The event was organized by the Writers’ Centre Norwich, as part of The Norfolk And Norwich Festival, and a review of the lecture can be found by clicking here

An article written by Kira Cochrane for The Guardian about women and publishing in Britain today is also worth a read. Click here for more.

Finally, Words And Women have now got a Contact Us page. Please feel free to use this to send us any information of events and readings and publications which you think will be of interest to us, and which you’d like us to advertise for you on this blog. We can’t promise we’ll be able to advertise everything, but we will do our best.