Pioneering publisher says industry still needs diversity

PUBLISHER and editor Margaret Busby has said the industry still requires “so much change” in terms of diversity.

Ghana-born Busby, who was Britain’s youngest and first black female book publisher, said she had seen improvements in her lifetime but that it remained important for readers to be offered a variety of voices.

In the 1960s, she co-founded the Soho-based publishing house Allison and Busby, working with an eclectic list of authors including James Ellroy, Michael

Horowitz and Jill Murphy. On today’s BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she says: “I think there is so much change that needs to be done still. Of course, there has been change. I think it is important that you get different people choosing the stories because you get different people consuming the stories as well.

“It is not that I only read books by black women. I read books by all sorts of people. It is not that people who write only write about themselves. I think you have to look at it in terms of ‘Why would you only eat spinach if you can also eat chocolate?’. And they are both good for you.”

Busby, who chaired the 2020 Booker Prize judging panel, praised the “different perspectives” of the judges, who selected Shuggie Bain by Glasgow-born author Douglas Stuart as the winner.

She told host Lauren Laverne: “I think you have to give credit to the people who chose the judges because it was a very diverse group of judges – diverse in terms of that fact it had people of different ages, people from different areas, different backgrounds.”