Only one publisher, And Other Stories, has answered Kamila Shamsie’s challenge to publish only female writers this year. But wider lessons are being learned, as the novelist and other industry insiders explain
2018 was meant to be the “year of publishing women”, after the novelist Kamila Shamsie challenged the books industry to publish no new titles by men for a year, in order to “redress the inequality” of the literary world. In the end, the tiny independent And Other Stories was the only publisher to rise to her challenge.
Her provocation, published in the Guardian back in 2015, saw the novelist lay out in detail the disproportionate space given to male authors and reviewers in the press, the male skew to writers submitted for the Booker prize and the greater number of male protagonists in award-winning novels. “Like any effective system of power – and patriarchy is, over time and space, the world’s most effective system of power – the means of keeping the power structure intact is complex,” she wrote, then suggesting “a year of publishing women: 2018, the centenary of women over the age of 30 getting the vote in the UK, seems appropriate.”
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