Latitude Festival’s Top 20 Books by Women

Apparently not a top novel
Apparently not a top novel

The Women’s Prize for Fiction has just posted Latitude Festival’s Top 20 Books by Women. What a disappointing selection! Only one originally written in a language other than English (Allende), only three others by non-UK, non-US writers (Roy, Atwood and Ngozi Adichie) and, FFS, Girl on a Train. May I politely remind them of María Luisa Bombal, Carmen Boullosa, Elizabeth Bowen, Kay Boyle, Mary Butts, A S Byatt, Angela Carter, Maryse Condé, Simone de Beauvoir, Alba de Céspedes, Ellen Douglas, Marguerite Duras, Anne Enright, Rosario Ferré, Elena Garro, Teolinda Gersâo, Natalia Ginzburg, Ellen Glasgow, Nadine Gordimer, Patricia Grace, Almudena Grandes, Han Kang, Marlen Haushofer, Qurratulain Hyder, Elfriede Jelinek, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Hiromi Kawakami, A L Kennedy, Agota Kristof, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Rosetta Loy, Dacia Maraini, Angeles Mastretta, Ana María Matute, Minae Mizumura, Elsa Morante, Herta Müller, Irène Némirovsky, Amélie Nothomb, Joyce Carol Oates, Yōko Ogawa, Anna Maria Ortese, Park Kyŏng-ni, Aline Pettersson, Elena Poniatowska, Ann Quin, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, Mercè Rodoreda, Nathalie Sarraute, Joanna Scott, Leïla Sebbar, Leslie Marmon Silko, Susan Sontag, Muriel Spark, Magda Szabó, Esther Tusquets, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Luisa Valenzuela, Marlene van Niekerk, Marina Warner, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Yourcenar, to name but a few? Do Hawkins, Mosse, Moran, Kingsolver, Sebold and Shriver come before Virginia Woolf or, indeed, the other excellent writers in my list above? I think not.

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