or maybe it's the readers who have the power

This week Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize and Hilary Mantel won the Booker.

Not that I generally like the Booker Prize books (almost always, I find them needlessly intricate and dense, which feels melodramatic... though Wolf Hall, the most recent win, is a historical novel about Henry VIII's court-- which is probably dramatic enough in its own right to break the cycle of boring settings and frustratingly "lyrical" language).

Not that I generally read the Nobel laureates (why so serious?).

But on the heels of my post that more people (especially women) should be more selfish and protective of their writing, the gender of both winners stood out.

Maybe it's not that women are too softhearted or servile or distracted. Maybe just as many women try as hard to write as men do. Do as many succeed to critical acclaim?

I don't know. *I* read a lot of female writers, and most my favorite writers are women:

Ann Tyler
Ruth Randell
Jane Smiley
Zadie Smith
Margaret Atwood
Z.Z. Packer

could write grocery lists and I'd read them, they're so high in my esteem... and those are just the writers who have books laying open in front of me as I type this. Because only a few prizes that go to books I usually like (the Whitbread/Costa *first* novel award, the Edger), I don't pay much attention to who wins the vast majority of them. But thinking about it, women are well represented with the (first novel) Costa prize, too, and the latest Edgar breakout star is Tana French (also a first novel winner).

It's strange that women are wayyyyy better represented in awards for first novels than for the awards generally, though, isn't it?

I don't know much about this subject, so if anyone does, please chime in. Maybe a lot of women show "talent" at the beginning, but get burned by their publishers, or burnt out emotionally, or maybe I'm just a first novel lover and don't pay enough attention to the industry's critical darlings generally.

What's going on with female writers and acclaim?