Publishers want more black authors. Why have they silenced us for so long?
The publishing industry is stilted and archaic. I worked in it for seven years, and left due to reasons I can’t legally talk about. Though, in that time, I was able to enforce and oversee some steps towards sustainable change. At 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, I started the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story prize (still going strong, five years later). Staggered by the lack of underrepresented voices, I knew I had to do something, anything to give those voices a way to permeate the industry.
It is taken for granted that wouldbe writers will know what a literary agent is. But most have no idea how to structure a book proposal, or where to send it. This information is possessed by those in the know, and the people in the know often want to keep it to themselves. Let’s talk about literary agents for a second; they are, effectively, tastemakers. Editors trust them to deliver books and authors that adhere to their (sometimes limited) taste. And what happens when these arbiters continue to work within the circles of writers who they already know? The same thing that always happens: books that follow trends, that look the same, that are written by the same kinds of people.
Following the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, one agent at Curtis Brown tweeted: “Maybe, there will now be a desire to read new voices and listen to the unheard and buy the books by those who – up to now – have been ignored by the mainstream.” But who is the mainstream, if not an agency as large and commanding of the literary space as Curtis Brown?
The curiosity to hear new voices has always been there. The desire to learn about unheard stories has always been there. White Teeth by Zadie
Smith was published to critical acclaim and commercial success in 2000. My novel Queenie has shown how a south London girl’s story can be loved in the UK and in the States (and it took until 2019 for a story like hers to reach the mainstream). Ordinary People by Diana Evans, published in 2018 and shortlisted for the Women’s prize, details exactly what the title suggests: the ordinary lives of a black and an interracial couple. We’re trying to tell these stories, but it’s as if the industry only allows a few of us to do so at one time.
For all its workshops and meetings, the publishing world is only just starting to put the work in to printing stories by black writers, and there are still so few on the shelves. So who has really been ignoring these writers, and these stories, up until now? Who should the onus be on here? Is it not the tastemakers? I won’t ever say that these things are too little, too late. There’s time to make long-standing change, but it has to come from the right place. And that place is understanding the role that the industry has been playing, up until now, in ignoring and suppressing black voices.