I'm a Literary Genius. Should I have children?

I'm A Literary GENIUS Should I have children? Kids open up a whole new world of things to write about. There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. Tracy Chevalier Cyril Connolly Creation or procreation? We looked at over 500 winners of 12 key literary prizes from 1960 to the present day. This is what we discovered. Genius fertility rate (1.6 UK fertility rate ? 1.9 US fertility rate 3 1.9 1. The 12 prizes were the Booker, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Fiction and Poetry, the Olivier Award for Best New Play, the Orange Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Whitbread/Costa Novel of the Year and the Whitbread/Costa Poetry Prize. Data sources: Contemporary Authors Online, the DLB, guardian.co.uk, other newspaper sites. 2. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/birth-summary-tables--england-and-wales/2011--final-7sb-births-and-deaths-in-england-and-wales--2011--final-.html 3. http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/18/u-s-birth-rates-hit-record-lows-is-it-the-economy/ Illustration: "Conception' by Luis Prado, from The Noun Project 2 My books are my children' What's the most common number of children for geniuses to have? ! 18 The second most The most common common number is two. number of children This is the most common is zero. family size in the UK. + This represents the 0.24% of geniuses with 8 children, Or to put it another way, this is Norman Mailer. 1. Where we could not establish the number of children a writer had, we omitted them from the list. Stephchildren were also left out as it was often impossible to work out how 'responsible' the writer was for their upbringing and they do not represent a conscious choice to procreate. The Gender Split Do female geniuses or male geniuses have the most children? 38% of female literary geniuses have no children, compared to 27% of male Genius fertility rate (female) 1.4 Genius fertility rate (male) 1.7 geniuses Examples of female writers with no children include: Vayec la nd Oetes The murdoch Amth Binoknen Harper Lee O Poetry or prose? Which type of genius has the most children?' Novelists Dramatists Poets 1.7 1.6 1.5 1. Novelists were classed as those who won the Booker, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize for Literature (sometimes), the Pulitzer for Fiction, the Orange/Women's Prize, PEN/Faulkner, and Whitbread/Costa Novel of the Year. Dramatists were those who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Olivier Best New Play and the Nobel (sometimes). Poets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Whitbread/Costa Poetry Prize and the Nobel (sometimes). The Big Winners We looked at writers who had won prizes on three or more occasions. Do they buck the trend? Number of children Edward Albee, Hilary Mantel, Iris Murdoch, Philip Roth Rose Tremain, Ha Jin August Wilson, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, William Golding, William Trevor, J.M.Coetzee Beryl Bainbridge, E.L.Doctorow, Seamus Heaney E. Annie Proulx, Saul Bellow, John Updike Two is the average number of children for big winners, and also the most common number of children for big winners. The most successful writers have more children on average than the UK or US population.