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Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen of Tramp Press
“This is a big deal for us” Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen of Tramp Press.
“This is a big deal for us” Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen of Tramp Press.

'Sexists need not apply': publisher refuses to look at manuscripts addressed to 'Dear sirs'

This article is more than 6 years old

Women behind Irish independent Tramp Press say they will no longer consider submissions from authors who assume they are men, or list only male influences

“Sexists need not apply” to the “dreaded women” who run Tramp Press, say the trail-blazing Irish independent publisher, which has announced it is closing its doors to “overtly sexist” submissions from writers who address them as “Dear Sirs”, or list only male influences.

The small press announced the change to its submission guidelines on social media. “We at Tramp experience sexism in lots of ways all the time, being dreaded women,” wrote Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen. “One really annoying way we experience it is when authors send us their manuscripts and do one or both of the following: 1. Addressing us as ‘Dear Sirs’ and 2. Sending us a cover letter in which they declare they do not read books by women.”

If either of these are included in a submission to Tramp, from now on Davis-Goff and Coen won’t read the manuscript. “This is a big deal for us – we’ve always kept the ‘slush pile’ open lest we let any truly exciting piece of work pass us by,” they wrote. But “it turns out that while overtly sexist authors send us a lot of work (a lot), they have never sent us anything we’ve wanted to publish. Not in over four years at Tramp, nor in our past publishing lives. But more importantly, people have to stop thinking there are no consequences to being sexist. So as of today, sexists need not apply.”

Tramp, which publishes authors including Mike McCormack, whose Solar Bones was longlisted for the Booker, and Sara Baume, whose A Line Made By Walking has just been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize, was set up in 2014. According to Davis-Goff, it receives three or four submissions a day and has been sent “well over” 2,000 since it launched.

“We get ‘dear sir’ amazingly often – a couple a week,” she said on Thursday. “Enough’s enough – we’re taking a little stand.”

Davis-Goff said the move was inspired by Anne Enright’s recent essay in the London Review of Books, in which the Man Booker prize winner explores sexism in publishing.

The novelist revealed how, when the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was published in 1991 with an almost entirely male line-up, she felt both “contempt for the editors involved” but also a “great sense of freedom”.

“If you aren’t going to be heard, then you can say what you like,” Enright wrote. “This unmasking of false authority gave me a sense of childish delight, and in the decade or so that followed I noted gleefully every time I was the only woman on the panel, every time I was interrupted on a panel, every time I was asked to go on a panel or read or speak ‘because they had no women’, because ‘they needed a woman’, because ‘they forgot to get any women’ or the more benign iterations of ‘because they would love to hear a female voice’.”

Enright concludes by noting a “new awareness, one that is fed by social media, acknowledged in print, supported by publishers and encouraged by festival curators”, and by expressing her hope that men and women will “finally sit side by side … There is plenty of room.”

Davis-Goff admitted Tramp Press has been criticised by those who disagree with its stance, but she said she was undeterred. “As soon as you put your head above the parapet, you get in these people’s sights,” she said. “Let them at it. I’m not too bothered.”

She remains convinced it is the right move. The people who address her and Coen as “dear sir” “haven’t stopped to look with a critical eye”, she said. “And words are so important – writers should know that better than anyone. If we could just get them to stop for a second, and consider why they might do this, that would be great.”

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