The imbalance of published writers by gender is a global issue that will likely linger on well after this new decade is gone, but we start the 2020s with news that a Belarus author is making an effort to redress the balance in her own country.
Belarus Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich explained to the Belarusian newspaper Nasha Niva that,
Men are everywhere, and very few works of women get published.
Alexievich has already lined up the works of two Belarusian authors, Eva Veznavets and Tatyana Skorkina, and when the press launches later this year the hope is that it will,
affect the confidence of women writers and their desire to write.”
Via the Calvert Journal.
With a population of 9.4 million, 7.5 million of whom are online, one might think a vibrant self-publishing community would have by now emerged in Belarus.
But with none of the big western ebook players even acknowledging Belarus exists, and little in the way of localised ebook or POD infrastructure, female authors in Belarus face an uphill struggle to be published at all, let alone reach an audience wide enough to support a career.
