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Wednesday, August 12, 2015

WITMonth Day 12 - Brief thoughts on genre diversity

First off: here's the link to my post from last year about "genre" writers. I don't have many more titles to add for this year, but I wanted to note a few things specifically I've learned over the past year.

For example, at some point this year it occurred to me that I was doing a pretty poor job of even defining "genre". Last year I lumped mysteries and thrillers in with SFF, ad tat was probably unfair to both genres. Furthermore, I completely neglected to look at things like graphic novels or comics, where you can actually find a fairly diverse range of women writers in translation (Moomins, Persepolis, Full Metal Alchemist to name but three).

I also didn't try to build a very comprehensive list. While that's not quite ready for this post, I do hope to have an encompassing "spotlight" post for diverse genres later in the month. There's a lot genres like SFF or historical fiction or whatever can offer the literary community at large, and this is certainly true within the fairly elitist "literature in translation subcommunity". While obviously genre diversity is often about personal taste, I do think it's important that we recognize the entire range of literature written by women in translation, and not just select titles. I didn't do a very good job of championing different genres last year, so hopefully I'll be able to improve on that this year.

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