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Irish Times
23-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
50 years of women's writing: The 21st century – a boom time... or is it?
This series has revisited women's writing of the past 50 years, tracking its recognition and visibility, and in the 21st century there has been undeniable progress. Irish women have fared exceptionally well, with Anne Enright and Anna Burns winning the Booker Prize, Lisa McInerney and Eimear McBride the Women's Prize; and the rise and rise of the cultural phenomenon that is Sally Rooney . Literary gatekeepers, it would seem, have seen the error of their omission and moved to rectify it. It would be cause for celebration were it not for the pesky numbers. In the past 25 years, there have been 17 male Booker Prize winners to 10 female, two of whom had to share. That's a ratio of almost 2:1, or to spell it out, two great male writers to every great woman writer. In the 21st century. Other prizes tell a similar story. Since 2000, nine women have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction compared to 16 men (two shared). READ MORE The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (formerly the Samuel Johnson), first awarded in 1999 and billed as the UK's premier annual prize for non-fiction, boasts just eight women winners to 17 men. The shortlists tell their own story: 98 men were shortlisted compared to 50 women, and on only three occasions did a shortlist feature more women than men. These three years boasted a woman winner. Coincidence? No. Shortlists matter. It goes without saying that this year's 25th anniversary one-off 'winner of winners' was a man. The Pulitzer General Non-fiction prize did no better: eight women, one shared with a male winner, to 19 men. (Literary prizes only seem to be shared when there's a woman involved.) It's almost as if subjects of interest to women historians and biographers and journalists could not possibly be of interest to anyone else. Once again, the Women's Prize took up the slack, introducing a non-fiction prize in 2023. Writer and broadcaster Kate Mosse , announcing the launch of the prize, said it was 'not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it's about adding the women in'. You can't argue with the numbers, yet so often that is precisely what happens. To those who would claim that one doesn't need gender balance on every shortlist and panel as long as it evens out in the long run, know this: it never evens out. The counts tell us this again and again: the VIDAs; #WakingTheFeminists' gender analysis of Irish theatre; Anne Enright's 2017 London Review of Books essay, Call Yourself George (fun fact: VIDA, in 2016, found that the London Review of Books had 'the worst gender disparity' in its reviews, with women representing only 18 per cent of reviewers and 26 per cent of authors reviewed). If we are to even pretend that we consider women writers equal to men, gender balance is needed in every literary journal, every newspaper review section, every prize list, long and short: everywhere. Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which won the 2014 Women's Prize for Fiction. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien In spite of a system stacked against them, 21st-century women writers flourished. For this woman writer, books kept me sane (by 2008 I had four children), and finally, after an extended apprenticeship, I wrote a couple myself. My PhD on women writing trauma kept me firmly in the zone, with a focus on Eimear McBride's singular novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and its astonishing stage production directed by Annie Ryan. There are too many books to talk about in this period, so I will pretend there is a gun to my head and I must choose just two. The Baillie Gifford in 2004 could not overlook Australian Anna Funder's brilliant Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, which sheds light on life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), 'the most perfected surveillance state of all time', where it was estimated that there was one informer for every 6.5 citizens. [ A breakthrough era for women's writing, from Edna O'Brien's risks to JK Rowling's Harry Potter debut Opens in new window ] Funder placed an ad in a newspaper asking to speak to former members of the secret police force, the Stasi, and received an overwhelming response. Following leads that took her to the most unexpected of places, she writes about the women 'who sit in Nuremberg puzzling together the shredded files the Stasi couldn't burn or pulp', and East Germans such as Sigrid Paul, who found herself on the opposite side of the wall to her baby, who was being cared for in Westend Hospital in West Berlin. Stasiland is not a history, trotting out impersonal facts; rather, it's a collection of essays, and essays digress. Deploying what Edward Hoagland calls the artful 'I' of an essay and other tools of fiction, Funder weaves her own story through the book, revealing life in the GDR in engaging, witty and often highly personal prose, joining the ranks of the many women essayists who made their mark over the timespan of this series: Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, Rachel Cusk, Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine, to name but a few. The Booker got it right with Milkman, Anna Burns' 2018 novel, which was also named best Irish fiction title of the 21st century in a recent Irish Times survey. I would go one further and take out the word Irish. Milkman is an extraordinary feat of telling the truth, slant, to invoke Emily Dickinson. Who knew that one of the most insightful and enlightening voices of the Troubles would be that of an unnamed teenaged protagonist who likes to read while walking? 'The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died,' it begins, and if you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? The category and methods that have largely defined this series – women and counting – show that progress has been made, albeit from a very low base, yet the gender gap in the literary field stubbornly remains. Not only are women authors seen as producing literature of lower literary value – literary prizes hammer this home again and again – there is even a gendered genre hierarchy. [ The Wardrobe Department by Elaine Garvey: Evocation of youthful self-discovery is well wrought and truthful Opens in new window ] Dutch researcher CW Koolen uses computational analysis and other methods to demonstrate that so-called 'chick lit', usually perceived to have been written by women, is seen as of lesser quality than spy or thriller novels, usually perceived to have been written by men. Counting is dull work, but as long as we live in societies that value and prioritise men's voices and experiences over women's, it remains necessary. (Space does not allow for distinctions of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, economic status, age, education, disability, etc, of the writers discussed in this series, but 'woman' is not a monolith, and over the past 25 years, across forms and genres, women writers have provided essential global sociopolitical perspectives.) This series has been about accountability, but it has also been a celebration of brilliant writing by women that informs, entertains, provokes and inspires. Women like myself, writing in the 21st century, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our literary foremothers – the essayists, poets, dramatists, critics and novelists – of the past 50 years. Leaning into my personal fiction bias, what other 21st-century flavoured novels would I press into your hand? In no particular order: Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin; 2003's Adolescence; My Year of Rest and Relaxation – the ultimate Millennial read, in which Ottessa Moshfegh's unnamed narrator spends most of the novel sleeping (yet we're still talking about it); Room by Emma Donoghue; Zadie Smith's White Teeth; Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – playing with all the forms; the Neapolitan novels, of course, by pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein), starting with My Brilliant Friend in 2012; The Weekend by Australian author Charlotte Wood; Theory and Practice by Sri Lankan-Australian author Michelle de Kretser, for anyone who has ever experienced the dubious pleasures of literary theory with a capital T; and there are so many more. Looking back has been a joy. And now I'm looking forward: here's to the next 50 years of women's writing. Paula McGrath is a novelist and assistant professor of Creative Writing at UCD Reading list Stasiland by Anna Funder (2004) – pulling back the Iron Curtain one essay at a time. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life (2024) – yes, I'm sneaking in Funder's novel, too. Wifedom combines the biography of Eileen O'Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, with personal memoir, exploring for both women what it means to be a writer and a wife. Milkman by Anna Burns (2018) – the GOAT, in this writer's humble opinion. Generation (2015) and A History of Running Away (2017) by Paula McGrath – because if you liked this series, you might enjoy the novels ...
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review
The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney's North (1975), Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns's Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy's Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them? 'I believe, these things, they're the making of us,' a character says at one point. He's talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland's past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it. The narrator of the title story, Jackie, sometimes uses slashes to prevent him having to choose between alternative nouns: 'It looks like a morgue/a nightmare and it smells like a butcher's but with chemicals mixed in.' Ní Chuinn's writing is often terse, blunt, its subject matter better served by urgency than elegance. Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment, before his birth, of his uncle and grandfather – also Jackie – and by loyalists having hijacked his parents' car when his mother was pregnant with him. When Jackie was a boy his father fell ill and appeared to enter a vegetative state. Ní Chuinn, a writer of subtlety despite the polemic that veins these stories, doesn't push hard on the metaphor, but this 'lax and unmoving' figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history. In fact, as another character – born, like Jackie, after the Good Friday agreement – insists later on, in Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history. Ní Chuinn forgoes an epigraph, but a lesser writer, one more in need of underlining their aims, would have reached for Faulkner's lines from Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' There is space, though, for other concerns and registers. Novena features Moll, second-generation Irish with a father from East Timor. Her grandmother, who is literally keeping the faith, texts Moll: 'Said special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.' But the church she attends announces the impossibility of single funerals owing to a lack of priests, and its congregants listen to hymns on CD because 'there is no choir'. In the story Russia, which centres on a brother and sister adopted from that country, a psychic asks her client why he's come. Aren't you supposed to know? he answers. 'The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You've, none of youse, you've no concept of how this works.' Ní Chuinn's humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use. The same story describes a series of anonymous protests at a museum. Flowers of remembrance are being left at exhibits containing human remains: the preserved corpse of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking skull, a stone age woman's bones. This broadens the book's preoccupation with the past while simultaneously, in the manner of Heaney's bog poems, linking ancient instances of violence with the sectarian murders committed within living memory. Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man's obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. 'I'm sick of this, right, Rowan?' his cousin Shane says. 'It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.' Rowan rejects not only the urge to leave the past behind, but Shane's characterisation: 'I hate that, says Rowan. It's not both sides, it's not either side, it's this huge fucking army, it's this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.' Reading this book as the Israeli state kills unprecedented numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza feels particularly difficult, but also valuable – or as valuable as reading can be in the circumstances. Ní Chuinn's stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren't their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Daisy Hill ends with a threnody subtitled The Truth, nine pages detailing more than 50 murders of Northern Irish civilians by British soldiers. Ní Chuinn quotes a Conservative government minister's contemporary praise for the impartiality and professionalism with which British soldiers performed their duties. 'The British state,' Ní Chuinn writes, correcting the record, 'kills and it kills and it kills and it kills.' This extraordinary book's final words – 'nobody is ever charged' – jam open the door to a past many would prefer to remain shut away. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review
The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney's North (1975), Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns's Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy's Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them? 'I believe, these things, they're the making of us,' a character says at one point. He's talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland's past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it. The narrator of the title story, Jackie, sometimes uses slashes to prevent him having to choose between alternative nouns: 'It looks like a morgue/a nightmare and it smells like a butcher's but with chemicals mixed in.' Ní Chuinn's writing is often terse, blunt, its subject matter better served by urgency than elegance. Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment, before his birth, of his uncle and grandfather – also Jackie – and by loyalists having hijacked his parents' car when his mother was pregnant with him. When Jackie was a boy his father fell ill and appeared to enter a vegetative state. Ní Chuinn, a writer of subtlety despite the polemic that veins these stories, doesn't push hard on the metaphor, but this 'lax and unmoving' figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history. In fact, as another character – born, like Jackie, after the Good Friday agreement – insists later on, in Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history. Ní Chuinn forgoes an epigraph, but a lesser writer, one more in need of underlining their aims, would have reached for Faulkner's lines from Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' There is space, though, for other concerns and registers. Novena features Moll, second-generation Irish with a father from East Timor. Her grandmother, who is literally keeping the faith, texts Moll: 'Said special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.' But the church she attends announces the impossibility of single funerals owing to a lack of priests, and its congregants listen to hymns on CD because 'there is no choir'. In the story Russia, which centres on a brother and sister adopted from that country, a psychic asks her client why he's come. Aren't you supposed to know? he answers. 'The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You've, none of youse, you've no concept of how this works.' Ní Chuinn's humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use. The same story describes a series of anonymous protests at a museum. Flowers of remembrance are being left at exhibits containing human remains: the preserved corpse of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking skull, a stone age woman's bones. This broadens the book's preoccupation with the past while simultaneously, in the manner of Heaney's bog poems, linking ancient instances of violence with the sectarian murders committed within living memory. Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man's obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. 'I'm sick of this, right, Rowan?' his cousin Shane says. 'It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.' Rowan rejects not only the urge to leave the past behind, but Shane's characterisation: 'I hate that, says Rowan. It's not both sides, it's not either side, it's this huge fucking army, it's this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.' Reading this book as the Israeli state kills unprecedented numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza feels particularly difficult, but also valuable – or as valuable as reading can be in the circumstances. Ní Chuinn's stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren't their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Daisy Hill ends with a threnody subtitled The Truth, nine pages detailing more than 50 murders of Northern Irish civilians by British soldiers. Ní Chuinn quotes a Conservative government minister's contemporary praise for the impartiality and professionalism with which British soldiers performed their duties. 'The British state,' Ní Chuinn writes, correcting the record, 'kills and it kills and it kills and it kills.' This extraordinary book's final words – 'nobody is ever charged' – jam open the door to a past many would prefer to remain shut away. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
What was proposed as a basic taste by a chemist in 1908? The Saturday quiz
1 What was proposed as a basic taste by chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1908?2 At the centre of the Milky Way, what is Sagittarius A*?3 Which Booker prize-winning novel has no named characters?4 Miniminter, KSI and Zerkaa are members of which collective?5 The helots were people subjugated by which city-state?6 Which official censored British theatre until 1968?7 Which sculpture stands by the A1 in Gateshead?8 San Miguel beer and Tanduay, the world's bestselling rum, come from where?What links:9 Laputa; Nublar; Saint Marie; Skull; Sodor; Utopia?10 Castellaneta; Kavner; Cartwright; Smith?11 Frederick of Utrecht, 838; Thomas Becket, 1170; Óscar Romero, 1980?12 Chairman of ways and means; first deputy; second deputy?13 Dubris; Londinium; Verulamium; Venonis; Viroconium?14 Euphoria and Tattoo; What's Another Year and Hold Me Now?15 1858 medical textbook; Shonda Rhimes and Ellen Pompeo? 1 Umami.2 (Supermassive) black hole.3 Milkman (Anna Burns).4 The Sidemen (YouTube personalities).5 Sparta.6 Lord Chamberlain.7 Angel of the North.8 The Philippines.9 Fictional islands: Gulliver's Travels; Jurassic Park; Death in Paradise; King Kong; Thomas the Tank Engine; Thomas More book.10 Voices of The Simpsons: Homer; Marge; Bart; Lisa.11 Archbishops/bishops murdered in their cathedrals (and later canonised): the Netherlands; Canterbury; El Salvador.12 Deputy speakers of the Commons: Nusrat Ghani, Judith Cummins, and Caroline Nokes.13 Roman settlements linked by Watling Street: Dover; London; St Albans; High Cross; Wroxeter.14 Songs by double Eurovision winners: Loreen and Johnny Logan.15 Grey's Anatomy: Gray's Anatomy book; created TV series and played title character.
