The Staunch Book Prize: Feminist Initiative or Not?

Abstract

Features “Death is its own invention with its own effect and its own observances. You regard the failing body. The body is the vessel.” – “Closer to Where You Will Find Him,” by Michael Mattes Read Mattes’s story and more in the Illness & Literature feature starting on page 46. PHOTO: FEDERICO PICCIRILLO WORLDLIT.ORG 9 PHOTO: EVELYN/PEXELS O n November 25, 2018, a new book prize for crime novels where “no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered ” will be awarded for the first time. The Staunch Prize has been initiated and financed by author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless as a reaction to the rising body count in film and television. As a crime novelist and president of the largest European female crime writer association, Mörderische Schwestern e.V, this new prize grabbed my attention. And not just mine. Rarely have I witnessed such a controversial reception of a new and—with a monetary award of £ 2,000—relatively small prize. It took me by surprise, as my first reaction was entirely positive, if not to say enthusiastic. This is an award for novels that don’t contain the kind of brutal and voyeuristic violence against women which make me stop reading a book. I don’t want to read every gory detail of how a woman gets raped, tortured, slaughtered, disembodied. I don’t want to get these atrocious pictures into my head, and I am not alone in my distaste. About twenty-five years back, when it first became in vogue to take the crime novel reader into the depths of sadistic slaughter scenes, I simply brushed over the brutal scenes and carried on with the story; often I The Staunch Book Prize Feminist Initiative or Not? by Janet Clark CRIME & MYSTERY 10 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 liked the characters and the side plots that carried the characters from one book to the other. In the meantime, I try to avoid those books. Still, often enough, drastic sexual abuse and sadistic violence finds its way even into books where you don’t expect it, even worse since it turned into an inflationary-applied thrill-enhancing spice for TV and film scenes. With this in mind, I thought a prize encouraging writers to break with the spiral of obsessive violence against women would be a great initiative. Then I read and heard the critical voices, such as best-selling novelist Val McDermid and film critic Sonja Hartl, and plunged into heated discussions about the usefulness of the Staunch Prize to raise awareness toward violence against women. Val McDermid, who insists on the importance of writing about violence against women to ensure that these acts of violence do not go unnoticed, claims that “to impose a blanket ban on any writing that deals with this seems to me to be self-defeating.”1 I totally agree that writing about violence against women has been and still is important to highlight the unacceptable fact that such violence is a societal problem of pandemic proportions, with one out of three women having experienced physical or sexual violence, according to UN Women. Actually, neither of my adult crime novels would qualify for the prize, as each of them contain few but necessary scenes of violence against women—necessary, as it would arguably be difficult to write about domestic violence without depicting any violent scenes, and it would be unrealistic to write about a strong, female protagonist chasing down the murderer of her husband or, in another story, the abductor of her child, without her getting into some trouble when fighting the perpetrator. Still, I do not see this prize as a “blanket ban.” It’s one prize out of many, and most of the literary prizes carry some kind of limitation: age of the author, debut, region of the book setting, and many more. In my view, the prize is one way of drawing attention toward an undeniable trend of using horrific and perverse brutality as cheap plot devices. And it works: people talk about it. Let’s look at some facts surrounding violence toward women: 1. Most murder victims in real life are men. Most murder victims in...