What is #ReadWomen and Why I Follow It

Painting above: Beatrice (c.1896) by Marie Spartali Spillman 


 #ReadWomen is a challenge launched in 2014 by author and journalist Joanna Walsh, encouraging people to examine their bias with the books they consume:

It's a truth universally acknowledged that, although women read more than men, and books by female authors are published in roughly the same numbers, they are more easily overlooked. Their marginalisation by top literary journals, both as reviewers and the reviewed, is confirmed in a yearly count by the organisation Vida: Women in Literary Arts.



Anna James, ELLE literary editor of 2015 further stated:

For now, we need to highlight the imbalance by magnifying the problem but we can all make a change today by simply taking some risks with our reading lists.
This isn’t about censoring your Kindle, it’s about making a conscious decision to consume a diverse variety of voices.



I myself am an avid reader, and since 2014 I have been doing #ReadWomen, sometimes reading nothing but female and non-binary authors for the entire year. I will be posting past reading lists on this blog so you can follow along. 


To learn more on this and importance of diversity in literature, watch the  2009 TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (pictured above), “The Danger of a Single Story” *


*Update June 2021: When I wrote this post originally in May 2020, it was before Adichie's transphobic comments (made in defence of J.K. Rowling) were publicized in November 2020. For more on this, I suggest you head on over to Bitch and read 4 Nigerian Authors to Read Who Haven’t Been Proudly Transphobic by Gloria Oladipo.

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