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Written by: Sarah Berger
In the midst of the #MeToo movement, one writer is asking novelists to boot brutality against women, highlighting how often it’s littered throughout thriller literature.
Bridget Lawless, a London-based screenwriter and author of educational materials on violence, is offering a prize of £2,000 — equivalent to about $2,800 — for a thriller that doesn’t use violence against women as a plot device.
The inaugural Staunch Book Prize will be awarded to the author of such a tome in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.
“As violence against women in fiction reaches a ridiculous high, the Staunch Book Prize invites thriller writers to keep us on the edge of our seats without resorting to the same old clichés — particularly female characters who are sexually assaulted (however ‘necessary to the plot’), or done away with (however ingeniously),” its website states.
Citing an article from Book Riot, the website reports that, out of 22 thrillers on New York Times Fiction Bestsellers of 2017 List, 59 percent had violence towards women described in the summary of the book.
For 2018, CNBC Make It found that as of Feb. 14, of the six titles snagging the weekly top spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list in the combined print and e-book fiction category, 50 percent of those books had violence towards women described in the summary… Read More