We’ve just come back from a week in the West Country, where we visited, among other places, the village of North Tawton, whose adopted son Ted Hughes is celebrated and commemorated with a blue plaque at the village centre.

Court Green is the beautiful old farmhouse he first purchased in 1961, together with the poet he was then married to, Sylvia Plath. The house has tremendous presence. One can only imagine that it has a long memory also.

We returned home – after almost a week of blissfully internet-free days – to discover that ‘Part One’ of this year’s submissions for the Clarke Award had been published over at the ACCA site. This consists of 33 novels, all the submissions that happen to be by women. The announcment led in turn to this rather predictable and variously inaccurate piece by David Barnett at The Guardian’s books blog. Barnett refers to ‘last year’s kerfuffle’ over an all-male shortlist, the award supposedly ‘dogged by controversy’. Well, as someone who studied last year’s subs list pretty obsessively and judged only two or three of the very few submitted works by women as active contenders, I think the selection of an all-male shortlist might be described as almost inevitable rather than surprising or controversial. It was certainly not the fault of the award or the judges. At least part of the problem, as 2013 judge Liz Williams articulated at the time, would appear to lie somewhere deep within the attitudes and selection processes of contemporary UK publishing. I might point to plainly visible examples of this – how can a novelist of Tricia Sullivan’s calibre not be currently under contract, for instance? – or to behind-the-scenes stonewalling – I personally know of several extremely talented women writers who have either taken years to find a publisher or who have been actively discouraged from using speculative themes in their writing. These are the problems we need to be outing. Plus, would it really have been so hard for The Guardian to have asked a woman to write about this issue on their blog?? Oh, irony. Most of the discussion I’ve seen online about the women-first submissions announcement has been from men…

I see what Clarke are trying to do, and OK, but the only effect it seems to be having is to leave everyone shuffling around looking a bit embarrassed, waiting for the rest of the subs to be announced so they can have a proper discussion about the potential shortlist. I don’t know. Perhaps someone thought we wouldn’t notice the women if they were mixed in among all those men.

The good news here is that one could easily make up a very fine shortlist from the 33 submissions announced so far. Which has got to be a great thing, no matter what one thinks of this particular little Clarke-experiment.

On the allied and similarly vexed subject of awards eligibility posts, I also found this forthright and eloquent post by Martin Lewis.

Yes, publishing is an industry but literature is an art. From my perspective, speculative fiction increasingly seems to be losing sight of this and we are moving to a situation where reviews and awards are viewed simply as publicity material. Worse, at any sign of push back to this cultural shift, authors play the victim. Slowly it is becoming the new norm for readers and authors alike… I find it very sad. I don’t want to live in a world where books are the same as toothbrushes and readers are just consumers. I want awards to be about readers recognising and discussing exceptional work.

Amen to that.