About eight years ago, the Canadian novelist Susan Swan looked into the research about how female writers compared with male ones when it came to literary prizes and coverage. She was shocked by what she found.
"I thought it was going to be a happy progress report," she said in an interview. "Instead it was a bad news day."
Books written by women were less likely to be reviewed or win the most prominent book awards, Swan said. Some of those numbers have shifted in recent years. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a group that tracks the gender imbalance in major publications, reported gains for female writers at several of them in 2018, and writers such as Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood, Susan Choi and Sarah M. Broom took home several of the highest-profile book awards last year.
