This week, it’s Twitter competition time!
To win the below books, you need to do two simple things:
- Follow us
- Send a tweet telling us who your heroine is and why – including the hashtag #thankaheroine
We’re looking for heroic women who value equality and contribute to positive social change.
We’ll pick the most interesting response and feature the heroine next month.
And you’ll win four fantastic books!
If you’d like to learn more about the incredible women who wrote these books, click on the author name for our articles – (our interview with Susie Orbach is coming soon!)
Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine – Bidisha
Internationally renowned feminist critic and writer Bidisha collects the testimonies of an occupied people – ordinary citizens, activists, children – alongside those of international aid workers and foreign visitors for a revelatory look at a population on the margins.
Called “beautifully belligerent, [and] fiercely intelligent” by the “Independent” and a “dazzlingly creative writer” by the “Times”, Bidisha amplifies the voices of the Palestinian people in this book and lends to them her own considerable strength.
Bodies – Susie Orbach
In the past decades, the pressure to perfect and design our bodies has been unprecedented. Men are encouraged to surgically pump up their pecs, breast enhancement is a sweet sixteen birthday present in the suburbs of America, and eating problems – from bulimia to obesity – are growing daily, affecting children as young as six. In China, women are having their legs broken and extended by 5cms. In Iran, behind the Hijab there are 35,000 cosmetic nose reconstructions a year. The body is no longer a given and to possess a flawless one has become the ambition of millions.
In her years of practice as a psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach raises the fundamental questions about how we arrived here and proposes a new theory on how we became embodied.
Tender Buttons – Gertrude Stein
Before becoming the patron of Lost Generation artists, Gertrude Stein established her reputation as an innovative author whose style was closer to painting than literature. Stein’s strong influence on 20th-century literature is evident in this 1915 work of highly original prose rendered in thought-provoking experimental techniques.
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings – Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly was renowned as America’s first ‘girl stunt reporter’. She was a pioneer of investigative journalism, including an exposé of patient treatment at a mental asylum and a travelogue from her record-breaking race around the world in emulation of Phileas Fogg. This volume, the only printed and edited collection of Bly’s writings, includes her best-known works as well as many lesser-known pieces that capture the breadth of her career from her fierce opinion pieces to her remarkable World War I reporting.
