‘And the award goes to…’ Women on the Dutch literary award scene

Abstract

Prizes have become indispensable to contemporary literary culture and have developed into one of its most high-profiled phenomena. This article examines the intersections between literary awards and gender, whilst drawing on fieldtheoretical approaches to literature. It successively discusses awarding behaviour, jury composition, and jury reports of a large number of Dutch literary prizes from the post-war era to the present. It argues, that the award scene has been governed by a conservative judging habitus, which seems to be inspired by the literary dispositions, inclinations and preferences of (white) middle-aged men who have predominantly populated juries for many decades; yet a drastic change in jury composition and awarding behaviour has swept through the award scene in recent years, resulting in a steep rise of female laureates. Additionally, it examines the ways in which juries have written in their reports about gender in connection to literary quality over the course of years.