The Australian Women Writers’ Challenge is part of the growing world-wide movement to raise awareness of excellent writing by women. It helps readers to challenge the subconscious stereotypes that govern our choice of books to read. We are excited to be entering our third year and hope that we can help you do something about this issue.

I’ve always read a more-than-average number of books by female writers — I’m guessing maybe a third of my reads were by women, although I don’t have any data to back that up — but almost all of them were by Americans or Brits. When I realised this, it left me scratching my head. I love reading book set in my own backyard, and I want to see a healthy Australian publishing industry (partly for selfish reasons, I admit), so why didn’t I read more Aussie books?! Eventually I realised that a lot…