Men: the newly neglected demographic in fiction publishing?
You may remember the author and U of T writing professor David Gilmour and the scandal he caused some 12 years ago when he bragged (jokingly, I think) in an interview that he neither read nor taught women and instead preferred the “serious heterosexual guys… Real guy-guys”. Gilmour made international news and caused a multi-day meltdown on social media but was not really (what we would now describe) cancelled. A week after, back he was on the Shelagh Rogers book show as a columnist, and his U of T teaching post remained undisturbed. EJ Pratt library at Victoria College is the home of his journals and diaries. The Forest Hill-bred Upper Canada College attendee (and expulsee) and U of T graduate has not been publishing much since, but this could be due to a variety of other factors, including the bottom falling out of literary journalism in Canada.
A dozen years ago, the hashtag #readwomen was used in all seriousness on social media, as women novelists and critics were still fighting to up their quota in literary and general interest media while a lot of men in the “commanding heights of the literary economies” demonstrably preferred other men. (VIDA’s Counts, major news in lit circles each time they’d come out, usually revealed an extremely asymmetrical ratio of male to female critics published in and male to female authors of books reviewed in main literary journals. The very left wing LRB was, year after year, the most male-centric.) UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction was established in the far away 1996, due to the lack of women finalists on major literary awards. The seeds for the Carol Shields Prize were planted in 2012, this very febrile period of women in literary arts activism, but when its inaugural award was presented in 2023, we were in a very different era. It was to be recategorized as the prize for “women and non-binary authors” (!) and while welcome, it found itself in a world of fiction publishing that was beginning to observe the recession of men.