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Be it Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train, novels that feature violence toward women have dominated the thriller market in recent years, selling millions of copies and leading to major screen adaptations. Concerned about the popularization of these kinds of stories and how they might warp public perception of the dangers women face, in early 2018 British author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless created the Staunch Book Prize-an award given to a fictional thriller in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered. "I decided to launch a book prize that didn't reward violence to women as entertainment," says Lawless. "The original aim of the prize was to get the proliferation of violence toward women in popular culture-books, film, and television-into the conversation.... We soon learned how fed up with and genuinely concerned about graphic and sexual violence in fiction many people were."
The award is now in its second year, with submissions of thrillers (including the subgenres of crime, mystery, historical, science fiction, cyber, comedy, psychological, spy,...