Eliza clark writer11/21/2023 ![]() Indeed, young women are currently pioneering literary fiction from Sally Rooney’s sparse, tender relationship studies to Rebecca Watson’s fragmented and frenetic experimentation. We shouldn't see the lack of young male novelists as a triumph – the old king is dead, long live the queen – we should see it as a part of a much bigger problem.” I think the truth of it is that of UK debut novels (novels in translation or from the US present a different picture), the majority are by young white women. “Certainly, a novel by a young British man in my submissions inbox is a bit of a rarity. So, where have all the young men gone? I posed this question to Marigold Atkey, the editor at Daunt Books Publishing. The whole reaction to the article on Twitter seemed like some grand exercise in misreading, surely all of these noted writers couldn’t have purposefully ignored the “young” at the beginning of “young male novelist”. ![]() Another editor at a national women’s weekly glossy said she was “off to find a really small violin.” A bestselling author proffered the crying laughing emoji. “This made me laugh this morning,” said one former editor of a national arts magazine, attaching a picture of the article. How utterly bizarre it was to then see some people on Twitter take the bait – discussing the article as if it were some sort of joke. Especially when one considers how welcome a perspective it would be to see how young men are coping during our current politically and culturally fraught times. The fact there is no major UK or Irish male novelist, no household name, aged between 25 and 35 at the moment is immensely strange. Practically every writing generation has had its crew of young guys, from Amis and Ishiguro to Franzen and Foster Wallace. The piece also claimed that last year, 57 per cent of hardback fiction had been penned by women novelists, while the majority of the men who make up the remaining 43 per cent already had long-established and fairly solid careers, leaving barely any room for the incubation and nurturing of young male talent.Īs a book critic and young male writer myself, the article succinctly summed-up one of the least talked about problems (and it very much is a problem) within the current UK and Irish publishing industry: the lack of young male novelists. The piece had been sparked by the American writer Elizabeth Strout who claimed that the “female domination” of the publishing industry had led to a dearth of young male novelists. ![]() The Sunday Times had published a short article with the bait-y headline “Young male novelists left on the shelf”.
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