CMIS Fiction Focus recently compiled a list of the top ten female protagonists in recent Australian YA fiction. And guess what? Anonymity from Anonymity Jones is there! You go, girl!
At risk of stumbling blind into a debate for which I am completely unprepared, is it telling that only two of the ten in the initial list are written by blokes? And for the record, I'm not making a statement either way, I'm just pointing it out...(For Facebook Notes readers: this post is redirected from my 'head vs desk' blog at headvsdesk.blogspot.com)
4 comments:
Mate, that's great news! Some darn good books there too. Nice to see an Aussie list like that. Well done.
Pretty crafty blog post heading though. Boy, did I rush on over.
Good question indeed. I'm trying to think how many books by men have girl protagonists... and there's a few... but not heaps. Some of my favourite girls have been writ by men (Lyra Silvertongue springs to mind), but most of them are in speculative fiction (even John Marsden's Ellie is removed from reality). You don't seem to get a lot of men writing straight contemporary realism about girls.
I wonder if you would have written a book like AJ if you didn't have daughters, James?
Lili, I might have, even if I'd had sons, but only because I worked with young adults in my other life, and roughly half of those were girls, often feisty, often angry, often sad, often spirited, often fractured.
I like writing from a girl's POV - I did it in A Boat for Bridget, and in Full Moon Racing, as well as with a little less than half the characters in Town. It's fun, trying to get in that headspace.
Gus, you're a bad man...
Post a Comment