New romantics: after 57 years, men break through at the Romantic Novel Awards
Men have been named as winners of the Romantic Novel Awards for the first time, ending more than half a century in which female writers held a monopoly on affairs of the heart.
Kerry Wilkinson and Marius Gabriel are the first men to be honoured at the ceremony since the awards were founded in 1960.
Wilkinson, an author best known for his million-selling Jessica Daniel detective series, won the young adult category with Ten Birthdays, the story of a teenage girl dealing with bereavement.
The award for best historical novel went to Marius Gabriel for The Designer, a novel set in 1940s Paris. Gabriel began his career in the 1980s writing Mills and Boon novels under a female pseudonym, but now uses his own name.
Nicola Cornick, chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, said female readers have accepted that men can write about love.
“Women wanted to feel that they were reading stories by women for women, but these days that is an old-fashioned attitude. They are increasingly comfortable reading stories by men, and over the last few years there has been an increase in publishers submitting books by men,” Ms Cornick said.
“Writing under a female pseudonym is what used to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. I can think of a number of people who were members but always wrote under a female name.”
Wilkinson said he did not set out to write a “romance” or a novel aimed at women. “It was, and is, a story about growing up in a small town,” he said.
“Perhaps men have always written these types of story but they’ve been hidden in different genre types by publishers and editors - people who assume the books won’t sell otherwise, and want a car chase thrown in to make it a bit more blokey.”
Gabriel said it felt good to win an award under his own name. "For a long time the conventional wisdom in publishing was that women simply wouldn’t buy a romantic novel written by a man. So there was quite a lot of pressure from my publishers to keep quiet about who I was, in case sales suffered.
"I suppose it’s love that men are not supposed to enjoy reading or writing about. But my reviews tell me that a good many of my readers are men, so there," he said.
Wilkinson and Gabriel are the first men to win under their own names, but one other male winner can be found hidden in the archives.
The Romantic Novel of the Year 1978 was Merlin's Keep by Madeleine Brent, a breathless adventure about a girl raised in the Himalayas by an English soldier.
Brent's publisher picked up the award on her behalf, explaining that she was in Mexico. Years later, it emerged that Brent was actually Peter O'Donnell, creator of the Modesty Blaise comic strip.
The Association only discovered his true identity in 2009, a year before O'Donnell's death.
Other winners at this year's awards included Dani Atkins, who won the overall Romantic Novel of the Year award for This Love. Jilly Cooper received the Outstanding Achievement Award.
