New romantics: male authors scoop awards in ‘women’s genre’
MEN have been named as winners of the Romantic Novel Awards for the first time, ending more than half a century in which female writers held a monopoly on affairs of the heart.
Kerry Wilkinson and Marius Gabriel are the first men in the awards’ 58-year history to be honoured.
Wilkinson, an author best known for his million-selling Jessica Daniel detective series, won the young adult category with Ten Birthdays, the story of a teenage girl dealing with bereavement.
The award for best historical novel went to Marius Gabriel for The Designer, a novel set in 1940s Paris. Nicola Cornick, chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, said female readers have accepted that men can write about love.
“Women wanted to feel that they were reading stories by women for women, but these days that is an oldfashioned attitude. They are increasingly comfortable reading stories by men”, Ms Cornick said.
Wilkinson said he did not set out to write a “romance” or a novel aimed at women. “It was, and is, a story about growing up in a small town,” he said. “Perhaps men have always written these types of story but they’ve been hidden in different genre types by publishers and editors – people who assume the books won’t sell otherwise, and want a car chase thrown in to make it a bit more blokey.”
The 1978 award was won by Madeleine Brent. Years later, it emerged that Brent was actually Peter O’donnell, the creator of the Modesty Blaise comic strip.