{"id":870,"date":"2019-05-21T10:00:04","date_gmt":"2019-05-21T09:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/?p=870"},"modified":"2019-05-21T10:00:04","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T09:00:04","slug":"man-booker-international-2019-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2019\/05\/21\/man-booker-international-2019-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing the status quo: the 2019 Man Booker International prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight the winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize will be announced, and it\u2019s something of a landmark year for women in translation. I want to talk about how 2018\u2019s Year of Publishing Women, though it seemed to have a relatively small reach at the time, has had a significant impact on this prize: it’s possible that we\u2019re witnessing a coincidence on a grand scale, but perhaps the fact that the shortlist features a higher proportion of women than is usual for literary prizes is a direct consequence of the Year of Publishing Women \u2013 partly owing to what was published last year, but also because of an increased awareness of <\/span>the importance of striving for greater balance<\/a>. The gender ratio on this year\u2019s shortlist has made headlines everywhere, but even in neutral reports an unconscious bias is evident; in <\/span>The Guardian<\/em> it was <\/span>described as being \u201cdominated\u201d by women<\/a>, a phrasing quite rightly questioned <\/a><\/span>by women in translation advocate Meytal Radzinski. Her point was that no shortlist with the opposite ratio would be described as being \u201cdominated\u201d by men \u2013 that would just be normal, right?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Image from themanbookerprize.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Right. Except it\u2019s so wrong that this attitude of male \u201cdomination\u201d being normal is still prevalent. I\u2019ve encountered several people in the past year who have said they\u2019re unsure about whether there should be such a thing as a year of publishing only women, and so I\u2019m just going to nail my colours to the mast and say that at this point in history YES, THERE SHOULD: women are disadvantaged at every stage of the publishing process, and this is compounded in translated literature as women face a double marginalisation<\/a>. By not challenging this, we allow it to continue. Saying that we\u2019re not gender-biased but still having catalogues or bookshelves that are heavily weighted towards male authors is, I think, quite dangerous: there may not be conscious bias, but the bias that exists at all the stages a book goes through on its journey to translation, publication and reception is allowed to continue \u2013 is even normalised \u2013 if we ignore it by believing that not being deliberately biased against women in translation is enough to tilt the balance.<\/p>\n

So the Year of Publishing Women was brave and necessary, and opened a dialogue about the books that get published and those that don\u2019t. In an interview last year<\/a>, publicist Nicky Smalley told me that And Other Stories (the only publishing house to commit fully to the Year of Publishing Women) had to actively seek out books by women writers to fill the 2018 catalogue; one of those books, Alia Trabucco Zer\u00e1n’s debut novel The Remainder<\/em>, is now on the Man Booker International shortlist. The Remainder<\/em> is\u00a0a spirited dual narrative in which three young people shackled to the historical memory of the Chilean dictatorship drive a hearse through the mountains from Chile to Argentina in search of a corpse lost in transit, and was beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes for And Other Stories. Its well-deserved place on the shortlist represents activism at its best, and it is not the only success of the Year of Publishing Women: the more women are published, the more they will be discussed, reviewed and entered for prizes, and the more these lists might see a more lasting shift where people are no longer surprised to see the scales tipped towards a preponderance of women writers. Where this is no longer \u201cunprecedented\u201d<\/a>, no longer a surprising \u201cdomination\u201d, but something perfectly normal – just as it will continue be perfectly normal for the ratio to favour men on other occasions. Neither scenario should be surprising, and yet one of them is.<\/p>\n

The 2019 Man Booker International shortlist also smashes tired stereotypes of what women write about: women\u2019s writing is too often pigeonholed as \u201cromance\u201d, \u201cchick lit\u201d or \u201cwomen\u2019s fiction\u201d<\/a>, and it is assumed and accepted that women write for women (an attitude brilliantly challenged<\/a> by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett) \u2013 these kinds of facile assumptions are exactly what perpetuate the invisible bias that women writers have to confront every time they sit down to write. And yet the women-authored books on the Man Booker International shortlist are extremely diverse: as well as Trabucco Zer\u00e1n\u2019s debut novel, there is the second English-language publication of last year\u2019s winner, Olga Tokarczuk: the magnificent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead <\/em>is a\u00a0witty and poignant pseudo-noir murder mystery<\/a> flawlessly translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions. The difference in genre and voice from Flights<\/em> (Tokarczuk’s 2018 prizewinner<\/a>, translated by Jennifer Croft for Fitzcarraldo Editions), along with the sheer scope of her work, shows that we cannot pigeonhole Tokarczuk (and, with her, Polish literature or women\u2019s writing). And the excellent, ambitious books are not limited to\u00a0The Remainder<\/em> and Drive Your Plow<\/em> (though they are my two unequivocal favourites on the shortlist): in Celestial Bodies <\/em>Jokha Alharthi tells the history of Oman through the women of one fictional family, translated by Marilyn Booth for Sandstone Press; Annie Ernaux\u2019s The Years<\/em> is a \u201ccollective autobiography\u201d of twentieth-century French cultural history, translated by Alison L. Strayer for Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Marion Poschmann\u2019s The Pine Islands<\/em>, an excoriating account of one man\u2019s self-indulgent journey of enlightenment, finds new audiences in Jen Calleja\u2019s sardonic translation for Serpent\u2019s Tail.<\/p>\n

Women represent half of history, half of the world, half of life – let them fill half your bookshelf, and then we won\u2019t need a Year of Publishing Women or see women\u2019s success framed in terms of anomalous \u201cdomination\u201d. I\u2019ve mentioned the scales tipping, the balance shifting, the ratios changing: the theme for International Women\u2019s Day this year was \u201cBalance for Better\u201d, and I believe that the Year of Publishing Women has done exactly that. Shamsie noted<\/a> that the real point of interest would be what happened in 2019:<\/p>\n

\u201cWill we revert to the status quo or will a year of a radically transformed publishing landscape change our expectations of what is normal and our preconceptions of what is unchangeable?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2018 may not quite have been the \u201cradically transformed publishing landscape\u201d that Shamsie had hoped for, but the Year of Publishing Women did shake up expectations, complacencies, and resignation about the \u201cunchangeability\u201d of gender bias. The 2019 Man Booker International shortlist is testament to that, and as both gatekeepers and readers we need to carry on balancing for better so that the legacy of the Year of Publishing Women is not limited to one year, but carries on challenging the status quo until the status quo itself is changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tonight the winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize will be announced, and it\u2019s something of a landmark year for women in translation. I want to talk about how 2018\u2019s Year of Publishing Women, though it seemed to have a relatively small reach at the time, has had a significant impact on this prize: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21],"tags":[63,103,285,617,701,861,955,1055],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nChanging the status quo: the 2019 Man Booker International prize - Translating Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2019\/05\/21\/man-booker-international-2019-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Changing the status quo: the 2019 Man Booker International prize - Translating Women\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tonight the winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize will be announced, and it\u2019s something of a landmark year for women in translation. 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