Women Writers Day
Subject: Arts and humanities
On 19 October, the UOC is helping to celebrate this international day by sharing some recommendations of different authors.
The Swedish Academy recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the North American poet Louise Glück, making her the sixteenth woman to have received this distinction. Since the prize was established at the beginning of the 20th century, there have been a total of one hundred and seventeen winners, of which only 13.7% are women.
This gender bias is also seen in other literary awards such as the Cervantes Prize, with only five women out of a total of forty-five winners. We must also remember that many women authors have written either under pseudonyms or anonymously. As Virginia Woolf said in A Room of One's Own, "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman".
With the aim of highlighting the contribution made by women to the field of literature, 19 October will mark the fifth Women Writers Day, an initiative promoted by the National Library of Spain (BNE), the Spanish Federation of Women Executives (FEDEPE) and the Clásicas y Modernas Association.
Under this year's slogan of "The everyday efforts of women", the main event will consist of a reading of texts by twenty Spanish and Latin American women authors selected by this year's curator, Elvira Lindo.
You can watch the event online at 7 pm (CEST) on the BNE website. And if you want to read the excerpts of text, you'll find them in the UOC's institutional repository, O2. The selected authors include Teresa de Jesús, Rosalía de Castro, Ana María Matute, Mercè Rodoreda, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Concha Méndez.
Edit-a-thon
Another of the initiatives that you can join to mark Women Writers Day is the edit-a-thon. On 24 October from 10:30 am to 6 pm, you can go online and join other participants to help improve the Wikipedia entries of a list of women authors. If you want to take part, you'll need to sign up beforehand.
The UOC is also doing its bit to mark the event by organizing a Social media campaign.
Ten women authors who have revolutionized literature
In the Faculty of Arts and Humanities blog, the Global Literary Studies (GlobaLS) research group has put together a list of ten women authors whose work has revolutionized literature.
Massa mare project by LletrA
It is an anthology of poetry written by multimedia women and in progress coordinated by the Catalan philologist Maria Cabrera and by the playwright and stage director Raquel Tomàs, with the collaboration of the UOC LletrA virtual space on Catalan literature on the internet.
Maria Cabrera chooses three poems by each author, and the poet chooses an object to associate; Raquel Tomás, based on these choices, creates a still life: a static landscape in which the intimate meaning of the verses floats - slow and latent, apparently immobile.
The UOC is also doing its bit to mark the event by organizing a Social media campaign
The University Camilo José Cela Library and the UOC Library are launching a social media campaign to raise the profile of women writers. On 19 October, the two libraries will be posting literary recommendations from their teams via the Instagram account @biblioteca.ucjc and the Twitter account @UOCbiblioteca. To see the recommendations, just follow the tags #Recomanaescriptores and #Recomiendaescritoras.
And what about you? What women authors do you love? Joint the initiative by sharing your recommendation for a book by a woman author.
Helping to achieve sustainable development
The UOC's strategy has been designed to include the 2030 Agenda and its seventeen goals. As part of this effort, universities and libraries are called upon to tackle inequality by implementing measures to help attain Sustainable Development Goal 5: to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
