Do we need more male novelists?

Last week The Times set the internet a flurry by publishing a piece headlined “Young male novelists left on the shelf,” which suggested women in the publishing industry have made it near-impossible to succeed as a contemporary male fiction author. The article was prompted by an interview with the American writer Elizabeth Strout in which she said: “Those women work hard to get where they are and they are good at their jobs, but do I think it’s a good thing? Well, I think that it makes it too narrow. I mean, if it was all male-dominated that would be a bad thing. And if it’s all female-dominated, then that might be just as bad.”

Female writers accounted for 57 per cent of hardback fiction bestsellers and 62 per cent of paperbacks in 2020. Male writers, the author Boris Starling argues in a piece for the Mail Online, have been pushed into script writing over novel-writing due to the female domination of the publishing industry and because they are less likely to accept low advances when they “could be earning more elsewhere”. 

The outrage that followed the Times article is understandable. Finally, women are reading more, studying English and creative writing in higher numbers, and yet the absence of men in these fields and the consequential slowing of new male literature is framed entirely as women freezing men out. For centuries the scales have been tipped the other way, but even a moment on the other side seems unbearable. 

There is an element of the chicken and egg debate here, in that women read more than men, and men read literature written by women far less than literature written by men (only 19 per cent of the readership of the top 10 bestselling female authors is male). Less demand, less supply. Without a new Philip Roth, maybe the 20-year-old man will be more likely to find sanctuary in Raven Leilani or Margaret Atwood. After all, the point of literature is not only to find yourself in someone else’s writing but to also transport yourself into the mind, body and experiences of people different from yourself.

Of course, the counterargument is that women equally benefit in this way from reading the words of men (we don’t need as much contemporary literature to enable this though – there is plenty in existence). But there is no doubt that what the world needs is a little more empathy, supported by a good dose of imagination to put yourself in the shoes of others. There is little more effective in cultivating this empathy than literature; we should be focusing energy on encouraging boys to read for fun at a school level. Teaching them that they can read any book in the library and undermining the idea that certain books are for boys or girls, or that boys read non-fiction over literature.

The point of equality is to create something better, not just a role reversal. Female authors were iced out of literature and the publishing industry (and much of the rest of the world) for so long through a mythical lack of “space”. We now know the success of young, female contemporary authors does not have to be at the cost of young, male contemporary authors and we have the choice to share the space. We need both men and women reading and writing to give the next generation an array of literary voices to be proud of.

Whilst we argue about the success of female novelists, we also ignore a much more pressing issue for the industry. A 2020 UK Publishers Association Study found that only 13 per cent of respondents identified as from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, whilst 26.1 per cent grew up in southeast England and eight per cent of respondents attended an independent or fee-paying school (almost three times higher than the UK average). There are questions of privilege that the industry needs to address. Articles like this in The Times act as distracting fanfare with a clickbait headline. 

It is to be expected for the scales to shift as they try to find a balance, but the refusal to share space is something a female-dominated publishing industry should endeavour to change, where a male-dominated one failed to.