Helen Miles
posted 19 April 2007

By the time Patricia Ferguson found Solidus, her book It So Happens, had been rejected by many publishers despite her excellent track record. We loved it. We published it and submitted it for the Orange Prize. It was duly longlisted.

Life changed for everyone. We sold thousands instead of hundreds of Pat’s books. Libraries bought it in bulk. Newspapers reviewed it enthusiastically. And most importantly, Pat once again considered herself to be 'a writer' and started writing again. She got an agent based on this success, and settled down to write the next novel.

You might imagine that the next book would be snapped up. It certainly got huge critical acclaim from the publishers who saw it – many paragraphs were devoted to the excellent quality of the work, before the final sentence that began ‘but we are sorry …’. The fear, you see, was that her book might not be a ‘bestseller’.

So Pat returned to Solidus. We read it, we loved it, we published it and submitted it for the Orange Prize. It was long-listed, it was reviewed enthusiastically in newspapers and sold in quantity to libraries. With authors like Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler and Margaret Forster sharing the longlist, it is impossible for Pat not to understand that she is an author of considerable merit.

So this is what a book prize means to an author, and to a small publisher. It is our only way of fighting the massive machine of mainstream publishing, with its huge advances and even huger marketing machinery. It is the way in which an author can be ranked amongst her peers despite having the limited support that a house such as Solidus can offer.

This year, as before, there are charges that women’s writing is in some way inferior, domestic, limited. And at the same time, there are charges of sexism; suggestions that, since women writers are now present in all major prize lists, they do not need the special treatment of a women-only prize. Surely we can’t have it both ways? There are wonderful writers around of both sexes, and plenty of less wonderful ones too. But let’s not forget that something like 70% of fiction is bought and read by women. If the men feel so strongly about it, let them create a men-only prize.

I was proudly showing off Peripheral Vision to a group of friends last week. Several women picked it up and examined it. Three men exclaimed ‘is it fiction?’, rather in the way they might ask ‘does it smell of rotten fish?’. They resolutely left it untouched. This is sad, but it is the way of the world. Maybe if it had been written by a man called Garth Leadballs who had won the Ferrari Prize for Men’s Fiction, things might have been different. But the prize would have meant just as much to Garth Leadballs as it does to Pat Ferguson.

Helen Miles works at Solidus, publishers of the Orange longlisted Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson.