Wendy Perriam is a British novelist, whose work often reflects her strict convent background, against which she rebelled sharply, and her stories contain much explicit sexual content. She has also appeared frequently on radio and TV.
Wendy Perriam is a British novelist and graduate of St Anne's College, Oxford, who started writing at the age of five and wrote her first novel at eleven. Perriam then went silent as she struggled through a long period of depression and physical illness, having been expelled from her Catholic school for heresy and told she was in Satan's power. Many of her early novels explore the perils and, conversely, the great attractions of Catholicism. Perriam's work is also renowned for its explicit sexual content.
In 2002, she won the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award for Tread softly. [1] [2]
Perriam has appeared frequently on television and radio, and was once a regular contributor to the radio series Stop the Week and Fourth Column. She has also written for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, and appeared at many leading Literary Festivals. Her work has been critically acclaimed for its psychological insight and for its power to disturb as well as divert. She was described by the Sunday Telegraph as "one of the most interesting unsung novelists of her generation" and by the Herald Tribune as "one of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since Kingsley Amis".
Her 16th novel, Broken Places , published in paperback in 2012, was shortlisted for 2011 'Mind Book of the Year' award. In January 2013, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for her "outstanding contribution to literature and reading pleasure", by Kingston University, which houses her considerable archive.
Her latest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers Brilliant Lovers, was published in January 2015, and her most recent novel, Sing for Life, in November 2019.
Perriam has been twice married and has two stepchildren. Her own daughter - and only child, after two miscarriages - died of cancer in 2008. Perriam lives in London.
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.
The World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel, about a man, born out of wedlock to a feminist leader, who grows up to be a writer. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for several years. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979, and its first paperback edition won the Award the following year.
Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to The Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey was a British writer and campaigner for social reforms, including the rights of authors, and animal rights. The first of her seven novels was Hackenfeller's Ape (1953), a story concerning the ethics of sending a captive ape, Percy, into space. Brophy's The Snow Ball (1964), is considered her masterpiece: set at a costume ball on New Year's Eve, it is a glittering piece which weaves together sex, death and Mozart. In Transit (1969), is her most radical fiction in form and handling, and was in the vanguard of gender-fluid literary conceptualisations. The novel is considered to be a pioneering work of post-modernism and an iconic feminist surrealist fantasia.
Jean Ingelow was an English poet and novelist, who gained sudden fame in 1863. She also wrote several stories for children.
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
Dorothy Allison is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Mary Dorcey,(born 1950)the author of ten books,is an Irish poet, novelist and short story writer. "Life Holds Its Breath."her latest book was published this year 2022 by Salmon Poetry. She was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for her first collection of stories "A Noise from the Woodshed.' She has won critical acclaim internationally for her portrayal of romantic and erotic relationships between women and for her subversive and tender exploration of the mother/daughter dynamic. Her most recent poetry collection, published in February 2022. is "Life Holds Its Breath."
Dianne Warren is a Canadian novelist, dramatist and short story writer.
Literary Review is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at the University of Edinburgh. Its offices are on Lexington Street in Soho. The magazine was edited for fourteen years by veteran journalist Auberon Waugh. The current editor is Nancy Sladek.
Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.
Catherine A. Merriman is an English novelist and short story writer who has lived in South East Wales since 1973. Her work often addresses the experiences of women.
Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver, British Columbia based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. In 1990, collective members Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart used the intense debates within the queer community around sexual practice in the early 1990s to create the photographic exhibition Drawing the Line. Their photographs depicted a continuum of lesbian sexual practice ranging from kissing to whipping, bondage, and voyeurism. The project encouraged gallery viewers to comment on what they saw and how it made them feel by writing directly on the walls around the prints; allowing the viewer to "draw the line" and examine their ideas and beliefs about different sexual behaviors. “Drawing the Line” was made in response to the “porn wars” of the late 80’s-the feminist debate of if female sexual imagery was more oppressive to women, or if it was empowering to women. Kiss and Tell’s work explicitly embraced depictions of female sexuality, and encouraged the conversation between anti-porn feminists and sex positive feminists. The art was controversial, even more so as it was released in the era of the Red Hot Video Store bombings. The collective displayed their work to point out the double standard in which artists exploring politics and sexuality are “cause for alarm” and yet adult films and magazines that are much more explicit are of no concern. The show traveled widely in Canada and the United States in the 1990s, as well as showing in Australia and the Netherlands. In the summer of 2015 Kiss and Tell had redisplayed and revisited their exhibition “Drawing the Line.” This was featured at the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival in celebration of the work’s 25th anniversary, and was the first time in 13 years that it had been displayed.
Helen Benedict is an American novelist and journalist, best known for her writings on social injustice, the Iraq War and most recently, refugees.
Saman is an Indonesian novel by Ayu Utami published in 1998. It is Utami's first novel, and depicts the lives of four sexually-liberated female friends, and a former Catholic priest, Saman, for whom the book is named. Written in seven to eight months while Utami was unemployed, Saman sold over 100,000 copies and ignited a new literary movement known as sastra wangi that opened the doors to an influx of sexually-themed literary works by young Indonesian women.
Lost Girls is a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, depicting the sexually explicit adventures of three female fictional characters of the late 19th and early 20th century: Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Dorothy Gale from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Wendy Darling from J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy. They meet as adults in 1913 and describe and share some of their erotic adventures with each other.
The Center for Sex & Culture was a non-profit located in San Francisco at 1349 Mission St. between 9th and 10th. It closed its brick and mortar location in January 2019.
Tessa Jane Hadley is a British author, who writes novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her writing is realistic and often focuses on family relationships. Her novels have twice reached the longlists of the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and in 2016, she won the Hawthornden Prize, as well as one of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes for fiction. The Windham-Campbell judges describe her as "one of English's finest contemporary writers" and state that her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful." As of 2016, she is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Cecelia Frey is a Canadian poet, novelist, and short story writer. Her works have appeared in literary magazines and in numerous anthologies, and broadcast on CBC Radio as well as produced by the Women's Television Network. She was the 2018 recipient of the Golden Pen Lifetime Achievement Award.