Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

TRENDS

huge prize pot, we felt that the public-

ity our shortlisted authors and winner

get is worth more to them in the long

run than the cash.” Lawless will judge

this year’s award alongside actor, au-

thor, and British Parliament member

Lola Young, who has served as chair

for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now

called the Women’s Prize for Fiction),

the Caine Prize for African Writing,

and the Booker Prize; psychologist

Dominic Willmott, who specializes

in legal and criminal psychology; and

editor Elaine Richard, who has worked

at Little, Brown and Gourmet.

While many have applauded the

prize designed to challenge the nor-

malization of violence and recognize

inventiveness in the thriller genre,

the award has received some push-

back, particularly from thriller writ-

ers. “If we can’t stop human beings

from viciously harming one another,

we need to be able to write stories in

which that harm is subjected to psy-

chological and moral scrutiny, and

punished,” wrote best-selling thriller

writer Sophie Hannah in the Guard-

ian in January 2018. “There is no life-

changing experience that we should be

discouraged from writing and reading

about.” Hannah argued the prize could

have instead honored the thriller that

“most powerfully or sensitively tackles

the problem of violence against women

and girls.” She went on to quote fellow

thriller writer Steve Cavanagh, who

offered an analogy in a tweet: “Which

book highlights racism and prejudice

better? A book which is not about those

issues or To Kill a Mocking-

bird? Wouldn’t it be bet-

ter to celebrate a book that

could challenge prejudice

rather than celebrate a

book which ignores it?”

In response, last year’s

prizewinner, the Aus-

tralian novelist Jock

Serong—his winning

thriller, On the Java

Ridge, follows a group

of refugees at sea trying

to reach the Australian

shore—told the Wa sh-

ington Post that the award

isn’t designed to censor or

silence real conversation

about violence against

women but rather to ad-

dress “that laziness that

creeps in, the tropes

where women and girls

are used unthinkingly

as default victims in the

stor y.”

Lawless hopes the prize will en-

courage a greater range of plots and

themes in the thriller market, which

she describes as being dominated by

crime fiction, and notes that the in-

augural prize’s shortlist included a

mix of styles and subjects such as ter-

rorism, art theft, social media, police

corruption, racism, and global injus-

tice. “There are so many really inter-

esting settings and ideas—the scope

is endless,” she says. “I can’t wait to

see what writers come up with in the

f ut u re.” –GILA LYONS

JULY AUGUST 2019 16

B

e it Stieg Larsson’s

The Girl With the Dragon

Tat t o o or Paula Hawkins’s

The Girl on the Train, nov-

els that feature violence

toward women have dom-

inated the thriller market in recent

years, selling millions of copies and

leading to major screen adaptations.

Concerned about the popularization

of these kinds of stories and how they

might warp public perception of the

dangers women face, in

early 2018 British author

and screenwriter Bridget

Lawless created the

Staunch Book Prize—an

award given to a fictional

thriller in which no

woman is beaten, stalked,

sexually exploited, raped,

or murdered. “I decided

to launch a book prize

that didn’t reward vio-

lence to women as enter-

tainment,” says Lawless.

“The original aim of

the prize was to get the

proliferation of violence

toward women in popu-

lar culture—books, film,

and television—into the

conversation.... We soon

learned how fed up with

and genuinely concerned

about graphic and sexual

violence in fiction many

people were.”

The award is now in its second year,

with submissions of thrillers (including

the subgenres of crime, mystery, his-

torical, science fiction, cyber, comedy,

psychological, spy, suspense, political,

satirical, and disaster thrillers, with the

notable exception of horror and fantasy)

open until July 14. Although the con-

test charges an entry fee of £20, or ap-

proximately $26, the prize of £1,

($1,300) comes straight from Lawless’s

pocket. “We aren’t sponsored, no one

on the team gets paid, and entry fees

only cover costs,” she says. “As it’s not a

Prize for Thrillers Sparks Debate

“The original aim of the prize was to get the

proliferation of violence toward women in

popular culture—books, film, and television—

into the conversation.”

Bridget Lawless

clare park