Page 5 - The Staunch Test

THE STAUNCH TEST

The Staunch Book Prize has discovered some incredible thriller authors writing
truly great stories (you can see some of them via the dropdown menu on the
Winners page of the SBP website). Among them are exciting adventures, crime
novels, historical fiction, gay mysteries, spy stories, psychological thrillers…
Novels featuring science, politics, art, extreme weather, wild seas, heists,

terrorism — so many different and original takes on the thriller genre. The Prize
is open to published, unpublished and self-published work, because it can be
harder to get a novel that doesn’t fit within the current best-selling style
accepted for traditional publication. In our third year we added categories for
unpublished short stories and flash fiction and brought some fresh new voices
out to the world. There is no doubt that it’s possible to produce truly spell-
binding and innovative thrillers of any length without falling back on the very

tired old clichés of ‘woman as victim’.

But the prevalence of violence towards women on screen was still nagging at
me. I didn’t want to start a competition for screenplays, or a prize for produced
films or television shows. I wanted to create a tool, a framework for discussion,
and a way of highlighting the issues. And so, The Staunch Test was born.

Bridget Lawless