Female novelist shows that books about women don't win top literary awards

If you're an aspiring or established author and you're hoping to win a major literary award, here's some free advice: write about men.

Over the past 15 years, winners of prestigious prizes including the Man Booker, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer have predominantly been books about men, and written from a male perspective.

"It doesn't matter whether it was written by a man or a woman, it seems to be that the books that win the awards are about men," novelist Nicola Griffith tells As It Happens guest host Tom Harrington.

For instance, Griffith found that none of the last 15 winners of the Pulitzer Prize were books featuring a woman's point of view, nor were they written by women. She put this data into a pie chart:

"I knew there was a difference, but even I was rather surprised by how big the difference was," she says. More charts breaking down similar data from other top literary prizes are featured on Griffith's blog.

Griffith has theories about why male-driven narratives appear more award-worthy.

"We have been trained since birth — all women, all men everywhere — that men are important and serious and worthy, and women are frivolous and fun and just, other. Men are the norm... that perception's maintained by the stuff that we read. So when I pick up a book and it's got curly pink letters on it, I think it's probably going to be about somebody having children or trying to get a boyfriend and this doesn't interest me. The packaging makes me look elsewhere, because I want to read about people doing interesting things."