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Inua Ellams, who wrote the award-winning play An Evening With an Immigrant.
Inua Ellams, who wrote the award-winning play An Evening With an Immigrant. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Inua Ellams, who wrote the award-winning play An Evening With an Immigrant. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Breaking down the barriers – a new chapter in publishing

This article is more than 6 years old

Authors, agents, activists and publishers on their ideas for improving the prospects for BAME writers

  • Two years ago, we called publishers to account for the glaring lack of diversity in the industry. Have things improved?

Suresh Ariaratnam, literary agent

I set up as an agent in 2007 and about a quarter of my clients are people of colour. Representing them draws on my experiences of growing up as a second-generation immigrant and wanting to ensure that our culture today reflects all of us. In comparison to five years ago, there is greater receptivity, which is a positive, but more can and needs to be done.

Syima Aslam, co-director of Bradford Literature Festival

The thing that’s still very much lacking is enough cultural producers from BAME or socially excluded communities. We don’t have nearly enough people in arts management who are from these backgrounds. We have paid internships at our festival. It’s creating the pipeline of talent and that starts from school.

Nick Barley, artistic director of Edinburgh International book festival

Here in Scotland, the reality of a Brexit that the vast majority of Scottish voters didn’t want has prompted a backlash and an intense desire to celebrate diversity. This offers the perfect opportunity to build a greater breadth of voices into our festival programming. I’m not suggesting things will change overnight, and I’m convinced that tokenism and quotas would not offer a long-term fix.

Louise Doughty Photograph: Tabatha Fireman/Getty Images for Baileys

Louise Doughty, author

We’ve had enough talking shops and panel discussions where a group of well-meaning people say the right things to a roomful of people who already agree with them. On a practical level, I am setting up a scholarship for BAME students at UEA’s creative writing MA because I feel a particular affinity for new writers who look at our profession and say to themselves: “I want to do this but it doesn’t look like they want someone like me.”

Reni Eddo-Lodge, author


The first event I did around my book [Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People] was at the Southbank Centre in July 2017. People couldn’t get into the room and the atmosphere was electric. I have travelled around the world and the atmosphere is always the same. It’s as if I am stepping into something that the world was ready for; the excitement existed before my book came out … but it is important that I’m seen as part of a bigger voice, not as a lone voice. There’s a feeling that there can only be one book on this subject.

Bernardine Evaristo. Photograph: Darren Gerrish/WireImage

Bernardine Evaristo,
novelist and poet, below

When people talk about diversity in publishing, the focus is rarely on poetry. I founded the Complete Works mentoring scheme (2007-2017), directed by Nathalie Teitler. The project organised the mentoring of 30 poets of colour with many of Britain’s leading poets. Alumni have gone on to huge success and include Warsan Shire (who collaborated with Beyoncé on Lemonade); Inua Ellams, whose play An Evening with an Immigrant recently won a Liberty Human Rights award; Sarah Howe, who won the TS Eliot prize for her first collection, Loop of Jade; and Mona Arshi, who similarly won the Forward prize for Small Hands. It’s an example of a scheme that actually works.

Val Garside, HR director of Penguin Random House UK

We are the only UK publisher to offer fully paid two-week placements at the national living wage, with candidates for our work experience placements randomly selected to give everyone an equal opportunity; we don’t accept any personal referrals. We also offer subsidised accommodation through a partnership with the Book Trade Charity. So far, these changes have had a positive impact on the makeup of applicants for work experience at Penguin Random House UK.

Ruth Harrison, director of literature at development agency Spread the Word

We have been through these cycles before when diversity and inclusion have been the thing of the day and then disappeared. Nothing will truly change unless you make it a core part of the business. We are launching London writer’s awards for 2018, a one-year development programme for 30 writers every year for BAME, low income, disabled writers. It’s about supporting that pipeline into the industry.

Dee Jarrett-Macauley, chair of the board of trustees of the Caine prize

We can’t talk about publishing in isolation. When Lenny Henry talked about more black people on television and in films, he was talking about more producers, more directors and more representation behind the scenes. That’s important for writers too. You need a culturally responsive and multi-ethnic world around you; you can’t just sit in a room.

Julia Mabey, publisher at Oneworld

Earlier this year we were awarded the IPG diversity award. But there is undoubtedly more work to be done, and at Oneworld, where we no longer accept direct submissions from fiction authors, we are in the process of setting up an open submissions month specifically aimed at unpublished BAME authors, which will take place every November in commemoration of Black History Month.

Crystal Mahey-Morgan, publisher at OWN IT!

Since 2015 there’s been a huge rise in schemes and quotas to try to address the lack of diversity in publishing and make it more inclusive. Hiring more people of colour in itself is not a solution if you don’t then value the different perspectives those people bring, and truly give them an opportunity to contribute and change our industry for the better both in terms of culture and commerciality.

Mend Mariwany, co-founder of the Barelit festival

We wanted to offer a platform to writers of colour that doesn’t centre around diversity but their actual work. That’s not to avoid the question of diversity, but to offer nuanced conversations that engage writers on their art form, inspirations and research.

Stephen Page, CEO of Faber

We are partnering with Creative Access to create a 20-week internship for a BAME candidate, and we’ll be doing that every year. The creative writing school Faber Academy is offering two scholarships to the six-month novel writing course and these are open to all socially excluded groups.

Sandeep Parmar, poet

British poetry has come a long way since Spread the Word’s 2005 Free Verse report found that less than 1% of all poetry published in the UK was written by poets of colour. It is my view that while literary prizes have given much-needed attention to BAME poets in recent years, a broader critical and reviewing culture must accompany publishing and accolades. With Ledbury poetry festival, Sarah Howe and I have launched the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics scheme for BAME reviewers.


Charlie Redmayne, CEO of HarperCollins UK

We have an established culture of mentoring at HarperCollins UK. I want to see more BAME people in senior roles, and mentoring is key to realising this ambition. I’m encouraged that we are on the right track by our recent inclusion on Business in the Community’s best employers for race list.

Sarah Shaffi, BAME in Publishing co-founder

It would always be nice for change to happen faster. It would be good to have scope for fast-track management programmes for all under-represented groups, and to accelerate this process. We don’t want to be waiting 20 years to take a slow, meandering path to the top tier. The problem at the moment is the whole pipeline. People of colour don’t see themselves in books and in publishing houses. Publishers say they don’t get the stuff coming through from agents, agents say there are few submissions from writers of colour, people of colour don’t see people like themselves published – and so the cycle never breaks. We have to be proactive until the gateways are opened up.

David Shelley, Hachette UK CEO designate

In January 2015, we started our Changing the Story programme, which was aimed at making Hachette a more diverse, inclusive employer and publisher. We have already championed a number of initiatives to attract new talent to the business, including our very successful Insight into Publishing (now called Inside Story) courses, but there was a real will to do more and to empower our staff to lead the change.

Kit De Waal Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Kit de Waal, author

I think class is the great divide in publishing. I funded a scholarship [at Birkbeck College] to enable someone from my background to do a creative writing master’s and I’m editing a book of short memoirs from working-class authors. I know of lots of other initiatives coming from writers and universities and independent publishers.


Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, editor and co-founder of Indigo Press

People in publishing at the moment are a sweet and thoughtful bunch but they are not asking the right questions. I have published across the range and will continue to do so but always at the forefront of my mind is: “What don’t I know and how might I find out?” These are the questions publishers should ask themselves. So a white, female commissioning editor could ask herself: “What do I not know about aspects of my society that could improve my world?” Another question to ask: who is not in the sales department?

More on this story

More on this story

  • Lunch with Mr Eliot and Kazuo Ishiguro with a guitar: untold tales from a lost literary Britain

  • Margaret Busby: how Britain's first black female publisher revolutionised literature – and never gave up

  • Lord of the Flies? ‘Rubbish’. Animal Farm? Too risky – Faber’s secrets revealed

  • Publishing must make room for disabled authors - for its own good

  • Where are the hotshot British male novelists? BAME authors may know

  • The Who's Pete Townshend announces debut novel, The Age of Anxiety

  • Gwendoline Riley's 'brutal' novel about toxic marriage wins Geoffrey Faber prize

  • Publisher accused of 'ripping off' best-selling book on racism

  • Unseen Sylvia Plath short story to be published in January

  • ‘Black and Asian people not seen as readers’: Bernardine Evaristo condemns books industry

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