The Staunch Book Prize

Headnote

Feminist Initiative or Not?

On November 25, 2018, a new book prize for crime novels where "no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered" will be awarded for the first time. The Staunch Prize has been initiated and financed by author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless as a reaction to the rising body count in film and television.

As a crime novelist and president of the largest European female crime writer association, Mörderische Schwestern e.V, this new prize grabbed my attention. And not just mine. Rarely have I witnessed such a controversial reception of a new and-with a monetary award of 2,000-relatively small prize.

It took me by surprise, as my first reaction was entirely positive, if not to say enthusiastic. This is an award for novels that don't contain the kind of brutal and voyeuristic violence against women which make me stop reading a book. I don't want to read every gory detail of how a woman gets raped, tortured, slaughtered, disembodied. I don't want to get these atrocious pictures into my head, and I am not alone in my distaste.

About twenty-five years back, when it first became in vogue to take the crime novel reader into the depths of sadistic slaughter scenes, I simply brushed over the brutal scenes and carried on with the story; often I liked the characters and the side plots that carried the characters from one book to the other. In the meantime, I try to avoid those books. Still, often enough, drastic sexual abuse and sadistic violence finds its way even into books where you don't expect it, even worse since it turned into an inflationary-applied thrill-enhancing spice for TV and film scenes.

With this in mind, I thought a prize encouraging writers to break with the spiral of obsessive violence against women would be a great initiative. Then I read and heard the critical voices, such as best-selling novelist Val McDermid and film critic Sonja Hartl, and plunged into heated discussions about the usefulness of the Staunch Prize to raise awareness toward violence against women. Val McDermid, who insists on the importance of writing about violence against women to ensure that these acts of violence do not go unnoticed, claims that "to impose a...