For International Women’s Day, we asked some of our friends and colleagues to tell us about their favourite books by female authors. Please enjoy these recommendations!
Liesl Rowe
Assistant Librarian
Let's go for the moderately more niche end of my reading tastes and Tamsyn Muir (her twitter handle is @tazmuir). On the one hand, her Locked Tomb series are a gripping space opera thriller with necromancers that I couldn't put down. Then again, her books are also amongst the few that made me love 2nd person with some phenomenal unreliable narration and immersive worldbuilding. There's a reason why my friends and I still have a groupchat analysing new things we've spotted in our respective rereads several years after we first picked up the books. Plus there's also the most ill-timed (and as such best) dad joke I've had the misfortune of reading. So something for everyone!
Hazel Bowley
Academic Skills Tutor
As International Women’s Day is about confronting inequalities, one of the books that has been really important for me is Laura Shepherds 2015 edited book Gender Matters in Global Politics. It's a great piece of feminist scholarship looking at gender’s role in politics and warfare.
Victoria Hunter
Assistant Librarian
Following Hazel, I’d like to recommend Laura Bates and her ground-breaking, "Everyday Sexism.” Missing the point entirely, Cosmopolitan reviewed it as "a must-read for every woman", but I'd suggest it's important for everyone, especially as Bates is really excellent at mixing often tough, well-researched insight with a really engaging voice that shows how important it is everyone calls out gender inequality.
Christopher R. Moore
Academic Skills Tutor
I’d like to recommend the best book I read in 2021 -Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. It’s a short story collection that’s as close to perfect as it is possible for fiction to be. Even now, months after reading it, I still find myself picking it back up just to admire it.
There are stories in this collection that are so audacious, it’s amazing that they even exist. One narrative is told through plot synopses for Law & Order SVU episodes. And it’s not just showy for aesthetic purposes either – every quirk and nuance is in service of its themes of trauma and the commodification of bodies, gender, and sexuality.
Read it, then lay on the floor (face down) and praise it.
Critical Thinking