Hierarchies of Legitimacy: Gender and Literary Prizes

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of the relationship between gender and literary prizes. I seek to answer questions around the symbolic violence that lies at the heart of the institution of the literary prize, the changing nature of this relationship between prizes and gender for both winners and shortlisted authors, and whether the gender representation on a judging panel influences the gender of the winning author. This chapter draws on the work of James English (New Literary History 33(1):109–135, 2002; The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), Sharon Norris (Journal for Cultural Research 10(2): 139–158, 2006), Beth Driscoll (Meanjin 68: 71–78, 2009; The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Claire Squires (A Companion to Creative Writing. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 291–303, 2013) to understand the place prizes hold in Bourdieu’s (appropriated) framework of cultural production, and the ability of literary prizes to identify and confer literary value within the field and beyond