The co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction says the three male authors who have been posing as Spanish female crime writer Carmen Mola should return the money they received for a big book prize – or donate it to a women’s literary cause.
“Earning a prize by faking a woman’s identity is a scam,” said Susan Swan in a statement on Monday. The Canadian author suggested if the men “want to restore their integrity,” they should consider giving the funds to something like Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, or the Carol Shields Prize. The latter, a new prize worth $150,000 is open to women, trans women and non-binary writers in Canada and the U.S.
“It’s ironic that a hundred years ago women often took a man’s name in order to get published and some women authors still prefer to use initials for their first name for that reason,” added Swan.
The shocking gender-bending plot twist – or deception, if you prefer – was revealed Friday, when Mola’s historical thriller The Beast won the Planeta Prize, worth €1-million ($1.4-million). The audience was stunned when three men – television writers Jorge Diaz, Agustin Martinez and Antonio Mercero – came up to the stage to accept it.
The revelation has attracted international attention. Mola, the celebrated author of the Elena Blanco detective series published by Penguin Random House, had been described in publicity material as a female university professor who juggled academia with motherhood and writing crime thrillers. A photo on Mola’s literary agency’s website depicts a woman in a trench coat, taken from the back. (The Beast is not an Inspector Blanco book; it is set in 19th-century Madrid during a cholera epidemic.)
Among the wow-were-we-ever-fooled factoids that emerged after the bombshell was a tidbit involving Margaret Atwood. Last year, a Spanish chapter of The Women’s Institute had recommended one of Mola’s thrillers in a list of must-read books and films by women that included Atwood. Mola’s The Girl was on the list, as was Atwood’s The Penelopiad.
Atwood was not bothered about sharing space on that list with a novel that turned out to be written by men. But she acknowledged that The Women’s Institute might not be happy about it. (She used somewhat less delicate phrasing.)
“It’s a great publicity stunt, as you can see,” Atwood said during an interview on Monday. “We’re all talking about it. And of course we’re all going to run out and buy Carmen Mola’s book I suppose. Just as we ran out and bought Elena Ferrante, did we not?” (Ferrante is the pseudonym for the Italian author best known for her Neapolitan novels. Mola has been called the Spanish Ferrante.)
“I think the problem is that some women’s groups or critics said ‘Oh what great insights into the female psyche.’ And it turned out that those insights were not coming from within the female psyche but from observers of the female psyche,” Atwood continued.
And how well they faked it!
These guys were crafty enough to tell a group whose very nature is divisive and unproductive what they wanted to hear.
When your audience is sad, fat, white liberal ladies and high-school students forced to read badly-written garbage by someone who pretends to understand the length and breadth of this country because one has stayed in a cabin in northern Ontario, it's easy to feel slighted.
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