The Guardian seems grateful that this year’s Booker winner puts masculinity back at the center of literary fiction, claiming that for a decade women have dominated litfic.
Novelist Caro Claire Burke looked at the numbers: men have ⁷won 60 - 80% of major book awards in the past decade. Seems like “female interiority” is sharing the stage.
Let’s imagine for a minute that litfic was dominated by women for a decade, contrary to fact.
Literary fiction as a term seems to have been popularized around 1980. That’s 35 years before women dominated. Take it back to modernists in the 1920s. Men dominated for 90 years, then. Or go back to the beginning of printing: 500+ years.
Even if women were winning 70 - 80% of literary prizes (and we aren’t), there’s a long way to go before anyone needs to worry that men are being pushed to the margins of literature.