You Tell Me | The Women's Prize for Fantastic Fiction

Just a quick one today, to point you all in the direction of yesterday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, in which I proposed a new award called the Women's Prize for Fantastic Fiction.

Why?

I'd have thought the answer would be obvious:

As a community, we’ve cried out again and again for better representation of the “invisible women” working in the male-dominated genre fiction industry... but crying out, however loudly, clearly isn't going to cut the mustard. So let’s do something about it, damn it! Let’s you and I put our heads together and figure out a speculative fiction friendly version of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kind of like the Not the Booker Prize that The Guardian has. 

A word to the wise: this isn’t going to lead to some seismic shift in the industry. Publishers may or may not change their ways, and whenever they do, if ever they do, they’ll change at their own pace. But if that’s the case, why wait? 

If any woman writing genre fiction in English — whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter — is eligible, then who and what would our nominees be? The only caveat I'd add is to keep our nominees to books published this year, please.

Do click on through to read the entire article, and leave your nominees in the comments.

Let me start you all off with a fantastic five of my own devising:

• The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord 
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson 
• The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker 
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie 
• The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough 

So what am I missing? What would your nominees be? You tell me!