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What It Costs: Women Speak Out

Women writers and artists speak out about loss to their creative, personal and professional lives due to trans activism

In conversation with Joan Smith

I was privileged to speak with novelist, essayist, columnist and human rights campaigner Joan Smith about her fiction and non-fiction writing, long walks, and combating men’s violence against women. It was the non-fiction bestseller Misogynies(1989) that brought me to Joan’s work after she spoke up for women’s free expression in the summer of 2019, when a […]

Review: Material Girls by Kathleen Stock

Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock, Fleet, hardcover, £16.99 I’ve been eagerly anticipating the publication of this book for over a year, and hoping that it would make it through the clashing rocks of the cancel crew in the book industry. The women who brought it to market have shown real […]

On “transphobia in the book industry”

An anonymous writer sent a three-page screed to the Bookseller which it duly published. While the letter drips with insinuation, it seems to be a response to David Shelley and Clare Alexander’s statements to a Lords committee on free expression. It also seems to be about some children’s authors’ objections to Onjali Rauf’s appointment as […]

Who’s the bully, again?

Here are the things that happened since we published our open letter to the Women’s Prize on 6th April 2021. Have a read and make up your mind who was attempting to “malign or bully” whom. — while we expected the silent treatment, the opposite happened: — 30,000 views of the letter in 24 hours […]

Review: Widowland, C.J. Carey

Quercus, Hardback, £14.99 C.J. Carey’s Widowland asks the question “what if a place existed where older women, already marginalised by society, were banished?” It draws upon the author’s experience of widowhood, and her research into the treatment of older German women during WWII. These so-called “Cemetary Women” were given the meanest rations because the National […]

Twitticism of the Open Letter to the Women’s Prize

Transing the dead: the letter is bad because women were mean to dead authors, who weren’t actually women, but men pretending to be women… The Unintentionally Hilarious: they deadnamed George Eliot waaaaaaah The Hopelessly Confused Misogynist: the letter is bad because men luxuriating in misogyny–as sex tourists–is the same as women exploring living with misogyny; […]

Signatories’ & critics’ comments on our Open Letter to the Women’s Prize

–SUPPORTIVE– Women writers need to be recognized for their talent. Not just now but for future generations so girls can see they can do it too. One solitary prize. One. The speed with which more than half of the world is being scoured from every last corner of its culture is staggeringly, viciously efficient. Please […]

Who Counts as a Wench Anyway? Aphra Behn Speaks Out*

It’s not easy being one of the only wenches on Grub Street. Dread of woman, among the woman-born, never seems to go out of fashion, even though–in fact, because of–the fact that every person who ever walked the earth owes their very life to a woman, to her body, and her care. Life can be […]

Follow-up to the Open Letter to the Women’s Prize

To the directors and trustees, We regret that, instead of acknowledging receipt of our letter and responding to us directly, you decided to issue a public statement mischaracterising us as “bullying” the judges, and the male author on the longlist. We completely reject that mischaracterisation. It feeds the perception—among liberal left people—that women standing up […]

Open letter to the Women’s Prize

To the directors and trustees, We write to you as concerned readers and authors. Originally, the Women’s Prize was established to recognise the contribution of female writers who were overlooked by other major literary awards. The founder launched it in response to the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Booker Prize. Over the years, the Women’s […]