We have now officially kicked off our weekly mini writing contests.
This week’s contest question is “Who is your favorite woman author and why?”
As before the winner will receive a free copy of our Freelance Writing Career Guide (A Rs. 450 value).
Contest prize:
Responses to this week’s contest question:
We’d like to say a heartfelt Thank you to all the writers who posted their entries. We hope you will continue to actively participate in our weekly contests.
From Ayn Rand’s brand of objectivism to Enid Blyton’s stories of adventure and fun the entries made for fantastic reading!
The winner of this week’s contest is Deepti Menon.
Deepti’s entry: How can one encompass the history of great writing by pointing out one woman writer? For me, it would be Enid Blyton for casting that magical net and capturing the imagination of young folks, moving on to Jane Austen who used romance cleverly with satire to lure her readers, Agatha Christie and Mary Stewart for the mystery and the Gothic, and Arundhati Roy, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee and Jumpa Lahiri for their sheer lyricism and beauty of language.
Congratulations Deepti! Our editor picked your entry as it celebrates the beauty and uniqueness of women writers across history.
The entries were all wonderful, without exception. We had a really hard time coming up with one winner!
In any case, since we are going to have these contests every week, you have many more chances to win. More importantly, many more chances to express yourself and be heard by a group of like-minded writers.
About our weekly contests:
Login to Facebook. Visit this page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chillibreeze/115106728508816
“Like” this page by hitting the Like Button on top. You will then be able to post comments on the page. Read the contest question and post your reply as a comment on the contest question post. Each week, one lucky winner will receive a free copy of our book “Your Freelance Writing Career: A Complete Guide for Indian Writers” (A Rs. 450 value).
If you see a winner announcement on this page, this week’s contest has been closed to entries already. Watch our Facebook page for next week’s contest question.
Hitting the “Like” button on top of our page will ensure you see the contest question as soon as it is posted.
What if you don’t have a Facebook account?
It is super easy to create one. But if you do not want to do this, go ahead and post your entry as a comment under this post.
You can see the previous week’s contest entries here
Any questions? Write to writers@chillibreeze.com.
Related posts:
- Weekly Writing Contest on Facebook: Week 2
- Weekly Writing Contest on Facebook: Week 4
- Weekly Writing Contest on Facebook: Week 5
- Weekly Writing Contest on Facebook
- Weekly Writing Contest on Facebook: Week 6
Comments:
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Jane Austen is my favourite woman author as her works carry a breathtaking array of romance, humour and irony. She delves into the human psyche and presents it in its myriad hues of pride, prejudice and passion.
True to her style, she possesses an indomitable will that is expressed through her writing. This is Maya Angelou! Candid and encouraging, her writing is a true representation of the harsh realities of life and the human will that screams ‘Still I Rise’. New writers will emerge, but words weaved out of a life well lived will remain, bringing tears, smiles and leaving its readers better human beings. This, to me is true of the writings of a truly ‘Phenomenal Woman’ – Maya Angelou.
Stephenie Meyer. She makes me want to romance vampires and befriend werewolves!
My favourite female author is yet to be born. She should have a terrific sense of humour. Be able to tackle the most disastrous subject humorously to take the sting out of the disaster. Help people to look at the funnier side of even the worst happening and believe me , it exists. If not, try and create funny situations. In short ease the pain of living through hell. We’ve had enough of authors glorifying pain and sorrow, haven’t we?
George Eliot is classic, British, canonical and possibly too copious for the casual twenty-first century reader. But, this late Victorian maestro is my favorite woman author for multiple reasons. Her novels provide us with an indepth assessment of the lives and the times around her and (few years) before her. She deals with personal issues like love, morality, patience, virtue, chastity etc, and some times these human struggles are contextualized in a much broader arena like in the times of the First reform Act(Felix Holt). However, that does not make her dated or topical in the narrow sense. Although, she is hailed as a realist, her usage of literary techniques like defamiliarization show that she was indeed a conscious artist, who had many fantastic stories up her sleeves. One of the touchstone methods of evaluating a woman author is to consider the worthiness of her woman characters. Dorothea Brookes, Gwendolen Harleth and Maggie Tulliver are indeed complex and fascinating women, although Dinah Morris is a massive let down. The moral universe of her novels was deeply influenced by esoteric philosophers like Spinoza, Feuerbach and by the tenets of Darwinism. However, all these learning did not make her obscure and it did not alienate her from her readers. Like Dickens, she went on spinning yarns, which became very popular. She became a moral guide for the people, who in those conservative times surprisingly overlooked the fact that she was living a conjugal life with George Lewes even without marrying him. So, whether we read George Eliot for instruction or delight, she remains a must-read for readers, who are no doubt separated from her in time and space but can find solace in losing themselves in her intricately woven fictional worlds.
The moment I saw this question. the name which flashed before me is the writer of “Atlas Shrugged” – “Ayn Rand”.
Her thought provoking philosophy imbibed in “Atlas Shrugged” transformed me.
I cannot help from saying a famous quote from that book which inspire from time to time
“Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved,
but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours”..
Kudos to this great writer whose works serve as inspiration centuries even after their creation.
Pearl Buck is my favorite female author. I was really touched and almost broke down (on reading her book “The Good Earth”) because she had portrayed the Chinese peasants “with such love, affection and humanity” which i rarely found in Novels. She became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”
When I read it , I could relate to similar situations in the Indian context. The narration literally “melted” my heart. I could understand and appreciate China through her book. It made compelling reading. The charatctres are real full of life and their tribulations really go deep into one’s heart. The style is almost biblical and flows like a poem.
Pearl S. Buck, for her ability to recreate a world totally unknown to me, magically before my eyes with her superb word-strokes. The Good Earth, besides being a window to pre-revolution Chin and a saga of generational divide, is a testimony to the power and importance of earth, of soil itself–a source of sustenance and continued growth.
Jhumpa Lahiri, for her sensitive portrayal of the simplest of things happening in one’s life on a day to day basis. Her short stories were brilliant–each of them took me through the highs and lows that the characters went through.