Cross-posted from Australianwomenwriters.com.
(Will this appear in “News”?)

This week the Australian Women Writers Challenge reached a milestone: over 1000 reviews have been linked to the site.

We should be celebrating, right?

Or should we?

Over at Meanjin last week, while discussing the progress of funding for The Stella Prize, Chris Flynn wrote: “Is it too late to predict contenders for the inaugural Stella Prize? Too late, I’m doing it.”

Flynn proceeded to list 10 books of fiction released in 2012.

So far, six of these have been reviewed for AWW :

Four of the ten have not.

It made me wonder to what extent the challenge has achieved what it set out to achieve: to help redress the gender imbalance of reviews in literary pages. Would these participants have read and reviewed the above books anyway?

What about the other books on Flynn’s list? Any plans to read and review?