It was these imperatives that prompted the launch of the Asian Women Writers’ Festival (AWWF). It doesn’t help that women’s literature isn’t clearly defined - it’s perceived to encompass anything from “the yearning of fairy princesses” and beyond, explains Manini Samarth, a senior lecturer in English and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University. But statistics exposing gender imbalance in the critical literary world were found to be so dismal in 2013 that it prompted a grassroots movement on Twitter with the hashtag #readwomen2014 (where participants pledged to read or review books by women only for the entire year). Conventional thought is also that women are more serious than men when it comes to reading. After all, a good two-thirds of the recent top 15 fiction titles on the New York Times Bestsellers lists are by female writers (Jojo Moyes even takes two spots with Me Before You and After You). One would think parity for women in literature has been achieved.
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