Scottish writer SARA SHERIDAN argues that literary snobbery is a destructive and divisive force. She defines it as a prevailing attitude that prefers male authors to female, sees war as a superior subject to family and celebrates the literary over the commerical…The result is an unfair distribution of prizes, reviews, media attention and advances,
In her thought-provoking guest post at Women Writers, Women’s Books, she says that “most writers come into the publishing industry imagining an open creative door, where their work will be judged solely on merit”. Instead “they find a fissured landscape”.
Effectively, now we have a two-tier system – a staid ‘literary’ community, which doles out reviews and prizes, and a commercial community that is far more concerned with real readers in numbers. The nature of the former is predominately male, the latter, I would say is mixed, if not more female.
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Viv Drewa - The Owl Lady 