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International book prize for study on feminist publishing

3 August 2005

A Monash academic has won the international SHARP DeLong book prize for the best work in print culture for 2004.

2005 SHARP DeLong book prize winner, Dr Simone Murray.

Dr Simone Murray, a lecturer in Communications and Media in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, received the award for her scholarly analysis of the history and politics of feminist publishing houses over the past 35 years.

Dr Murray is the first Australian to win the annual award and the youngest ever recipient.

The prize was awarded last month by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), an international association established in 1991 for scholars and researchers of print culture - from medieval manuscripts to the Internet. The society received 60 entries for this year's prize.

Dr Murray's book, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics, took almost a decade to come to fruition. It is adapted from her PhD thesis completed at University College London (UK) in 1999, which analysed feminist book publishing in Britain across last century.

"The feminist press movement was talked about a lot in the general media, but not much of that work crossed over into academia," Dr Murray said. "This book is the first to try and fill that gap in knowledge from the past 35 years."

She said feminist presses were described as ‘mixed media' as they were always attempting to balance politics with profit making.

"These publishing houses had an enormous impact -- they changed the publishing industry, literary culture and academic curricula. It is now much easier to sell feminist writings to mainstream publishing houses."

Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (Pluto Press, London 2004), looks at the emergence of British feminist publishing houses during the second wave of feminism from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the transformation of feminist publishing.

Publishers featured include Virago Press, Pandora Press, The Women's Press, Sheba Feminist Publishers and Sliver Moon Books.