Recommended Writers
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Medusa, Helen Mort
I said my first reviews would be of novels written by women. That was until I saw Medusa, poet Helen Mort’s first full length theatre piece, at The Carriageworks in Leeds on Halloween night. Having long been an admirer of Helen’s, I knew the writing would be accomplished but was interested to see how she would…
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Baby X, Rebecca Ann Smith
Plaiting together the stories of Dr Alex Mansfield, Dolly, and Karen Frey, Rebecca Ann Smith’s Baby X tracks these women’s relationships with a human foetus as it develops in an artificial uterus. This is a novel about fertility treatment and its implications, about the danger of privatising health services and the ways in which a…
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Why I’ve decided to write about books written by women
It is well-known that there are inequities for women at all stages of their writing careers. (This is valid for other groups but here I’m focussing on gender, although intersectionality will feature). Catherine Nichols found a scandalously more positive response when sending her novel out under a male pseudonym than when she attributed it to…