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Penni Mitchell
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FREE ONLINE INFORMATION ABOUT CANADA'S EARLY (PRE-1940) WOMEN WRITERS
Bonjour mes amies,
It may interest you to know that the library of Simon Fraser University offers online, free of charge, biographical and publication information for about 470 (!) women who lived in Canada or wrote about Canada, and who authored an English-language book or pamphlet of fiction or poetry published BEFORE 1940. This collection includes titles of publications and references to archival resources. Directed by Dr. Carole Gerson, this project has been supported by CFI, SSHRC, the University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University.
To browse this collection, go to:
http://content.lib.sfu.ca/cdm/
and click on the photos-images on the left to see the information for each author.
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LEACOCK AWARD’S HISTORY OF OVERLOOKING WOMEN IS NO LAUGHING MATTER
By Jennifer Villamere, Special to the Toronto Star, April 29, 2015, see full text at:
http://www.thestar.com/
Since its creation in 1947, women have won the only (Canadian) national award for humour writing just six times ( . . .) Zarqa Nawaz’s Laughing All The Way to the Mosque was shortlisted this year for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. But what chance does she have of winning the $15,000 prize on Thursday? If gender is an indicator, not much. For starters, she’s up against four men ( . . . )
The annual Leacock Award is presented to the Canadian who has written the year’s best humour book in English. Only 9 per cent of the winners have been women. By comparison, 38 per cent of Giller Prize winners and 30 per cent of the winners of the Governor General’s Award for English Language Fiction have been women. “I’m surprised by the numbers, quite frankly. There are many, many funny female writers out there,” says Aaron Bushkowsky, shortlisted this year for Curtains for Roy ( . . . ) It’s not for lack of female representation on the judging panel (. ..).“There have probably been more women than men judging over the last 10 years” ( . . . )
Patricia Pearson, who was shortlisted for the award in 2004, wonders if the lack of representation is part of “a broader system bias.” “The jury can only judge books and those books first have to get published, and publishers want known writers, so newspaper and magazine editors would first have to recruit funny female writers,” Pearson notes. Numerous writers we interviewed for this story shared a similar concern ( . . . ) “The selection bias in publishing and in society takes place long before the books reach the (Leacock judiciary),” says Robert Wringham, who’s on this year’s short list. “How could external genitalia possibly make you a better humorist? Mine have got a few good laughs admittedly, but I can hardly take credit for that.”
