Daily Archives: 10 December 2019

This is my round-up post for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2019.

I read a total of 38 books by Australian women writers, well over the goal of ten that I’d set for myself. They ranged from Alexis Wright’s 640 page many-voiced Tracker to picture books with fewer than 100 words, and included:

• 19 books for very young children
• 8 books of poetry
• 2 novels (only 2!)
• 6 memoir/biography/history/essay/creative non-fiction
• 2 books that mixed genres (one poems and recipes, the other a novella and essays)
• 1 short book of art criticism

Three books were written by Indigenous Australian women. None were translated from languages other than English. The list doesn’t include journals.

You can see my blog entries on them at this link.

Now I’m signing up for another year, at the Franklin level, which means I aim to read and review 10 books by Australian women in 2020.

On a related topic, I’ve done a quick gender check on books I read this year altogether [and updated it on 30 December]. Not counting journals or children’s picture books, I read:

• 30 31 by women
• 29 33 by men

I read four five books in translation (two three from French, one each from Japanese and German), and two in their original French.