Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled: “This could change your life.” – Helen Exley
Violence against women (VAW) is a prevalent and entrenched part of countless societies around the world but it is still considered a taboo topic even, to a certain extent, in developed and first-world communities. Pop culture media, therefore, is invaluable at raising awareness, and promoting and prompting advocacy against VAW, doing much to break the silence.
The Pixel Project’s Read For Pixels campaign was first launched in September 2014 in recognition of the longstanding power of books to shape cultural ideas and influence the direction of history. From Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird to to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, popular authors and their stories have been instrumental in planting ideas, triggering thoughtful water-cooler discussions, and providing food for thought for communities. And in the age of geek culture and social media, bestselling authors wield influence beyond just their books as they are able to directly communicate with their readers and fans via Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, and other social media channels.
Since then, the campaign has gone from strength to strength. To date, almost 300 award-winning bestselling authors from genres as diverse as Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime, Mystery, Crime, Thrillers, Horror, Romance, Women’s Fiction, Historical Fiction, Young Adult, and Poetry have participated in various Read For Pixels campaigns and initiatives, raising approximately $130,000 for the cause to end VAW to date.
In this article, we honour 16 award-winning bestselling authors who participated in our Read For Pixels campaigns and initiatives in 2025. They hail from genres as diverse as Horror, Young Adult, Mystery/Thriller, Poetry, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. Some are international bestsellers with strong fandoms, others are well-respected in their countries or genres. Still others are up-and-coming stars who have decided to use their talents for good. It is the movement to end VAW that unites and inspires them and we hope that all of them will continue to work with the movement in years to come.
To learn more about what each author has to say about violence against women, click on their quote to be taken to their blog or YouTube interview.
It’s time to stop violence against women. Together.
Written and compiled by Regina Yau. Interview transcriptions by Jay Spink Mills.
Inspired to support The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Make a donation to us today OR buy our 1st poetry collection, Under Her Eye. All donations and net proceeds from book sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
Author Against VAW 1: Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun, and I AM AI. During her Read For Pixels panel session, Ai talked about how poetry can effectively help with the cultural change needed to stop violence against women, saying: “Because so many poems, like the weight of them, strikes the emotional core. And I feel like when people feel shaken, I guess, enough to change something within their life. Change action or take action. I feel like that is what poetry does best.”
Author Against VAW 2: Carol Gyzander
Carol Gyzander is a Bram Stoker Award winning horror author/anthologist of twisted tales that touch your heart. Her stabby feminist anthology, Discontinue If Death Ensues, is a World Fantasy Award finalist; her “Bobblehead” poem is a Rhysling Award finalist. As HWA-NY Chapter Co-Chair, she co-hosts their Galactic Terrors reading series. When discussing how poetry can be a catalyst for anti-violence against women activism, Carol said: “I think that it can be very powerful in a lot of cases. Even in some sort of social gathering, or a protest, or whatever, where people are getting together for a purpose. A poem is a limited number of words you can repeat over and over and over like a chant, and that can really bring people together and remind them of why they’re there, why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
Author Against VAW 3: Catriona Ward
Catriona Ward is a three-time winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel for The Girl from Rawblood, her debut, and for Little Eve and The Last House on Needless Street. Little Eve also won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. Her books The Last House on Needless Street, Sundial and Looking Glass Sound are international bestsellers, and her next book is the forthcoming Nowhere Burning. When discussing how authors can use their craft to help with the cultural changes needed to stop violence against women, she said: “An author’s job is to represent truthfully and go as deep as you can into the troublesome, into the dreadful places. […] That’s what you can do. Like, show people what it’s really like.”
Author Against VAW 4: Cerece Rennie Murphy
Cerece Rennie Murphy has published twelve speculative fiction novels, short stories, and children’s books, including her latest release, In The Garden of Light and Shadow: The Chronicles of Ada St. James. She has received numerous awards including the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA)’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for significant contributions to the Science Fiction, Fantasy and related genres community. Ms. Murphy is also the founder of Virtuous Con, an online sci-fi and comic culture convention that celebrates the excellence of BIPOC creators in speculative fiction. When talking about why she supports stopping violence against women, she said: “When you hurt women you don’t just hurt women, you hurt their families. You hurt the families they support, the children they raise if that’s a choice that they have, and limit the incredible power that they have to change the world.”
Author Against VAW 5: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and professor whose books have been made into films and plays. She has published 23 books, including Mistress of Spices, Palace of Illusions, The Forest of Enchantments, The Last Queen and Independence, which won an American Book Award in 2024. She is the McDavid Professor in the internationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. When discussing how she joined the movement to end violence against women, she said: “I think it’s because I was exposed to this early. I was exposed to this in India where I saw a lot of women who had no agency in their lives or had very little agency in their lives. […] And then after I came to the United States, I started working. I was doing my Ph.D at the University of California in Berkeley and I joined their women’s centre as a volunteer. And I became aware that women were being treated badly […] often by their partners, by their […] significant others on campus. They were subjected to violence […] And I became aware that this was a big problem right here.”
Author Against VAW 6: Christina Sng
Christina Sng is the three-time Bram Stoker Award® and Elgin Award-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares, A Collection of Dreamscapes and The Gravity of Existence. Her poetry, fiction, essays and art appear in numerous venues worldwide, including Interstellar Flight Magazine, New Myths, Penumbric, Southwest Review and The Washington Post. In her Pixel Project interview for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, she said: “Everyone should support the ending of violence against women because violence against women destroys the lives of women, their children and the very fabric of society of which women are a fundamental part.”
Author Against VAW 7: Colleen Anderson
Colleen Anderson is an award-winning author who crafts curious collections: I Dreamed a World, The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams, Weird Worlds, with Vellum Leaves and Lettered Skins just released. Word curios can be found in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance and others. In her Domestic Violence Awareness Month interview with The Pixel Project, she said: “Any human being who thinks they are humanitarian and who believes in human rights must then see all people’s rights as being worth defending. No more turning a blind eye to the way women and girls are held to different standards and shelved as less than. Either you believe this or you’re not for women.”
Author Against VAW 8: Delia Pitts
Delia Pitts’ newest book, featuring Black PI Vandy Myrick, Death of an Ex, was published by Minotaur Books in 2025. She has also published several acclaimed short stories, including “The Killer,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021. Delia is an active member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America and Crime Writers of Color. When discussing how to effectively engage the reader with feminist ideas (including stopping violence against women) through stories without being pedantic or preachy, she said: “I think you most effectively present feminist ideas through characters, and their behaviours, and their movement through the world that you’ve created.”
Author Against VAW 9: Eden Royce
Eden Royce is a Shirley Jackson Award winner and a Bram Stoker Award nominee for her adult fiction. Her novels for young readers have won multiple awards, including the Ignyte, the Bram Stoker and the Walter Dean Myers Honor. When discussing why she supports stopping violence against women, Eden said: “I have seen and heard so many women and girls that have been absolutely destroyed by violence, the threat of violence. It’s not something that destroys individuals only. It destroys relationships, it destroys families. […] It leaves scars, it leaves lingering effects, it leaves trenches through individuals and through societies. […] It’s something that is absolutely destructive to our community at large, to the world at large.”
Author Against VAW 10: Jo Kaplan
Jo Kaplan is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated author whose books include It Will Just Be Us, When the Night Bells Ring and The Midnight Muse. In her Domestic Violence Awareness Month interview with The Pixel Project, she said: “No one should have to experience violence, and women and girls have been subjected to it throughout history. Though domestic violence has been illegal since the early 1900s, spousal rape was only made illegal in all 50 states in 1993. That’s only 32 years ago. And there is still so much to be done to prevent violence against women”.
Author Against VAW 11: John Langan
John Langan is the author of two novels and six collections of stories. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror awards. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and continues to serve on its Board of Advisors. When discussing what parents can do to teach their boys to help stop violence against women and girls during a Read For Pixels panel session about fathers and fatherhood in the Horror genre, John talked about the advice a friend shared about how she raised her sons into two decent and non-violent young men: “Constant communication, a constant willingness just to talk to them, and then to hear what they have to say.”
Author Against VAW 12: Premee Mohamed
Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, Ignyte and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her published works include novels, novellas and short fiction. When asked what authors can do to help with the cultural changes needed to stop violence against women, Premee said: “We can write these worlds and imagine better worlds, and start breaking through some of the repetitive messaging with repetitive messaging of our own, which is that, shockingly, (horribly, shockingly) women are people and deserve to be treated as people.”
Author Against VAW 13: Rachel Harrison
Rachel Harrison is the USA Today Bestselling author of So Thirsty, Black Sheep, Such Sharp Teeth, Cackle and The Return, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, as an Audible Original, and in her debut story collection Bad Dolls. When asked about what authors can do to help stop violence against women, she said: “In our work, just to make sure that we are being responsible with the characters we write and the situations. And if it’s being addressed, to make sure that it’s being addressed responsibly. […] I do think the most important thing that we can do is just lend our voices. So it doesn’t get forgotten. To keep talking about it and keep raising awareness.”
Author Against VAW 14: Richard Kadrey
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and is in development as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Dead Take the A Train (with Cassandra Khaw), The Pale House Devil and Butcher Bird. His work has been nominated for the BSFA, Locus, and DragonCon awards. When asked why he supports efforts to end violence against women, he said: “I’ve seen it in my family. I grew up with it. […] I’m better at saying it out loud now. For years I couldn’t, but there are monsters in my family. And the women in my family went through horrendous abuse at times. […] My mother moved out of where she lived, went to New York from a very rural area. Got into that wider world, and was able to get help from people. And getting away from that, dealing with that, was a huge thing. And some people escaped, and some people didn’t. And seeing that, you know, that was a big part of it.”
Author Against VAW 15: Robert V.S. Redick
Robert V.S. Redick is the author of The Red Wolf Conspiracy, Master Assassins, Sidewinders and other epic fantasies. His books have been shortlisted for the Locus Award, SFX Novel Award and the AWP/Thomas Dunne Award for Best Novel. He has taught fiction writing at Stonecoast, the University of Nevada, and elsewhere. When asked why he became a male ally to the movement to end violence against women, he said: “I’m so inspired by the women, like all of you, who are creatively and continuously acting against it, and I want to do what I can to be supportive of that and part of that.” He goes on to talk about how authors can help stop violence against women, saying: “To be raising my voice, and using my voice, and my storytelling, and whatever abilities to communicate I can to fight against that.”
Author Against VAW 16: Stephanie M. Wytovich
Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. She is a recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award, the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant and the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing. During her Read For Pixels panel session, Stephanie talked about poetry as a literary and artistic tool to help stop sexism, misogyny and violence against women. She said: “I think poetry gives voice to the abstract or to the indescribable. We might not know how to physically describe what we’re feeling but we can describe around it and somehow that still really resonates with people. […] We’re looking at the big picture, but we’re narrowing it down and making it more accessible and maybe more memorable that way because you can take it in small bites. So I think poetry, when it comes to horror and grief, I think is especially apt at what it does.”
Photo Credits
- Ai Jiang – Courtesy of Ai Jiang
- Carol Gyzander – Courtesy of Carol Gyzander
- Catriona Ward – Courtesy of Catriona Ward
- Cerece Rennie Murphy – Courtesy of Cerece Rennie Murphy
- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni – Courtesy of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Christina Sng – Courtesy of Christina Sng
- Colleen Anderson – Courtesy of Colleen Anderson
- Delia Pitts – Courtesy of Delia Pitts
- Eden Royce – Courtesy of Eden Royce
- Jo Kaplan – Courtesy of Jo Kaplan
- John Langan – Courtesy of John Langan
- Premee Mohamed – Courtesy of Premee Mohamed
- Rachel Harrison – Courtesy of Rachel Harrison
- Richard Kadrey – Courtesy of Richard Kadrey
- Robert V.S. Redick – Courtesy of Robert V.S. Redick
- Stephanie M. Wytovich – Courtesy of Stephanie M. Wytovich