Category: Authors

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‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Author Margaret Atwood Faces Backlash for Gender Neutrality Tweet

On Tuesday, Atwood tweeted out an article by Rosie DiManno from Friday’s Toronto Star entitled “Why Can’t We Say ‘Woman’ Anymore?” The opinion piece argues that gender-neutral language, such as “pregnant person,” equates to “an erasure of women” and causes “well-meaning” people to become “tongue-tied, lest they be attacked as transphobic or otherwise insensitive to the increasingly complex constructs of gender.” Read more

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Margaret Atwood and JM Coetzee demand release of jailed Iranian writers

The writers began a collective 15-and-a-half-year sentence at Evin Prison in Tehran in September 2020, on what writers’ association PEN America said were “spurious” national security and propaganda charges. Since then, Abtin and Khandan Mahabadi have both contracted Covid-19. Abtin is a poet, screenwriter and film-maker; Bajan is a novelist and journalist; and Khandan Mahabadi is an author and literary critic. Read more

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Nicaragua orders arrest of award-winning author Sergio Ramírez

Mr Ramírez, who won Spain’s Cervantes Prize for literature in 2017, is one of Nicaragua’s foremost writers. He has been accused of inciting hatred and conspiring to destabilise Nicaragua. Dozens of influential Nicaraguans have already been detained on similar charges as part of a crackdown on critics of President Daniel Ortega. Read more

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Ethel Carnie Holdsworth: campaigners push to revive fame of working-class novelist

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth wrote in 1914 that “literature up till now has been lopsided, dealing with life only from the standpoint of one class”. Now the Lancashire mill worker and author, a forgotten name who is believed to be the first working-class woman in Britain to publish a novel, and who in her heyday outsold HG Wells, is set to be celebrated with an alternative blue plaque and a return to print. Read more

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