This week, the prestigious literary magazine Granta announced the authors chosen to appear in its Best of Young British Novelists issue.
The great news is more women writers and non-British writers are on the list. The bad news is the contemporary literary world is still overwhelmingly male.
The list of Best Young British Novelists, which consists of 20 writers 40 years old and younger, has been compiled every 10 years since 1983. This year, the majority of the novelists on the list were either born outside of Britain or are children of immigrants, and 12 of them are women — compared to the six women on 1983’s and 1993’s lists and eight on 2003’s list.
Granta, first founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University and reborn in 1979, has published the early work of many writers who went on to great success: Ted Hughes, Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Martin Amis and Angela Carter, to name a few.
“The list has come to be regarded as a bellwether in the literary world, since so many of the writers singled out at that early stage of their careers ... have gone on to great critical and commercial success,” according to an article in The New York Times. So basically, being picked to appear in Granta is a huge freakin’ deal.
According to the same article in The New York Times, James Freeman, Granta editor, maintained that the magazine is not trying to fill a quota.
“We just wanted to find exciting writers, and it happens that the big storytellers of this generation are people with a very complicated sense of home,” Freeman said.
In an NPR article, Ellah Alfrey, Granta’s deputy editor, said, “The result reflects a happy reality of the literary landscape.”
Although it sounds nice, Alfrey’s statement is categorically untrue.
In March, VIDA, a grassroots organization for women in literary arts, released The Count 2012, a list of top literary magazines and reviews and their ratio of male-to-female inclusion. The ratios run across varying platforms: male to female book reviewers, bylines, authors reviewed and an overall average. Granta’s overall ratio was 41-to-30 in favor of men. Harper’s overall ratio was 158-to-31. The Atlantic clocked in at 236-to-83, and the New York Review of Books at 652-to-165.
Alfrey’s “happy reality” of the literary landscape is nonexistent, even with the presence of hugely successful contemporary female writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Kasischke, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood — not to mention the rise of young writers Téa Obreht, ZZ Packer and others.
I could name drop all day, and I still wouldn’t communicate how many phenomenal women writers contribute to the industry. So, why are they so underrepresented in reviews?
“To claim, as Granta does, that the best voices naturally rise to the top seems to trivialize how many real barriers there are in the literary world for women and minorities,” NPR reporter Annalisa Quinn wrote in an article. “Granta is filled with eclectic, lovely voices. But its editors do its contributors a disservice by implying that it isn’t much, much harder to achieve literary fame as a recent immigrant or as a woman.”
Unfortunately, big names do not equal big advancements for women in literature.
When I initially heard the good news that the fourth edition of the Young British Novelists issue contained twice as many women than the first and second editions, it didn’t seem like a big deal. The New Yorker’s Top 20 Under 40 is evenly split between men and women, and the current New York Times Bestseller list for fiction is filled with female writers. In terms of commercial success, women are big-time banking. It’s easy, then, to forget that the writers enjoying critical success are mostly male.
Is Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list a breakthrough for women and minorities? Certainly. However, the literary world, much like the tech world and the political sphere, has a lot of catching up to do.
Chloe Finch is a journalism sophomore at UF. Her column runs on Thursdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
