U.K. Publishing Houses That Embrace Diversity
During her 2009 Ted Talk, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrated the dangers of a single story that starts with childhood reading.
In 2015, development agency Spread the Word published a report on the U.K. book industry, which laid bare just how resolutely white, middle-class and male it was, and how this spanned literary festivals, book prizes, the publishing industry and staff recruitments. After several apologies were issued, the industry started announcing programmes - paid internships, mentoring schemes and trainings - to provide opportunities to applicants who wouldn’t normally get a look in.
We therefore wanted to talk about some of the publishing houses / imprints that continue to do this necessary work in 2019.
Dialogue Books
This imprint of Little, Brown (Hachette U.K.) is the brainchild of Sharmaine Lovegrove, a key voice in the publishing industry when it comes to pushing for diversity. As someone who has had to forge her own literary career outside of the mainstream, it will come as no surprise that Sharmaine champions stories by / about BAME, LGBTQ+, disabled and working-class voices.
Sharmaine worked as a bookseller from the age of 16, before going on to establish her own bookshop in Berlin in 2008. As well as setting up Dialogue Books, Sharmaine is also a chair on Changing the Story. This initiative highlights the long-term vision of Dialogue Books to ensure that the U.K. publishing industry continues to hire inclusive and diverse individuals so that Sharmaine, Margaret Busby and the late, great Toni Morrison are not one-off recruits with progressive work that can be immediately undone.
XX (Angela Chadwick), American Spy (Lauren Wilkinson) and This Brutal House (Niven Govinden) are just 3 of their recent titles that we have our eyes on! Pay a visit to their website.
Unbound
Unbound is a crowdfunding publishing initiative that puts the community in control. Readers can browse the extensive catalogue, pick a book to support (financially) then follow its journey right through to publication. We think this is a really innovative way to mix-up the publishing industry and allow for diverse voices to get published. As mentioned in the introduction to this piece, U.K. publishing houses are notorious for being run by white, middle-class people with a penchant for publishing stories about other white, middle-class people.
Once you become a member of Unbound, you are invited to regularly suggest platform features, test prototypes and provide feedback at each stage of the process. We have been following since they published The Good Immigrant (2016) an excellent collection of essays by writers of colour, edited by Nikesh Shukla. Recently, we have added Razia (Abda Khan) and Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers (ed. Kit de Waal) to our TBR pile.
Dead Ink Books
Dead Ink is a small publishing house with its headquarters in Liverpool, which already sets it apart as the majority of publishers are based in London. They’re funded in part by Arts Council England and focus on working with new or emerging authors. Their book covers show that they appreciate beautiful artwork, which is just the cherry on top in our opinion.
On their website they state that «…you don’t simply buy a Dead Ink book, you invest in the authors and the books you love », a sentiment that completely won us over. And the hard work is clearly paying off: their books have made the shortlist for The Saboteur Awards on 3 occasions and the longlists for both The Guardian’s First Book Award and Not the Booker Prize.
Silver Press
With a name inspired by a Sylvia Plath quote (“I am silver and exact”) and founded by 3 women (Joanna Biggs, Sarah Shin and Alice Spawls), Silver Press is an unabashedly feminist publisher, founded in 2017.
In case you don’t recognise their distinctive, block colour covers, let’s catch you up: in 2017 Silver Press published Your Silence Will Not Protect You, putting Audre Lorde’s essays and poems in a single volume for the first time. In the same year they also published The Debutante and Other Stories, the first collected edition of 20th century surrealist author Leonora Carrington's short stories. They followed this up in 2018 with a new edition of Nell Dunn's book of conversations from 1965, Talking to Women that includes an excellent introduction by Ali Smith. This year, they’ve published the first translation of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s memoir from 2013, My Mother Laughs.
Merky Books
Merky Books was launched in July 2018 by the British rapper and singer Stormzy, in a publishing partnership between William Heinemann and Penguin Random House U.K. The imprint promises to publish 2-3 titles max per year (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) and “form a home for a for a new generation of voices”. In March of this year, they announced their New Writers’ Prize for individuals between the ages of 16 and 30. Monika Radojevic and Hafsa Zayyan were recently announced as the 2019 winners and will have their work published shortly by Merky Books.
Whilst the first book published under the label was Stormzy’s own auto-biography (Rise Up) we found it highly encouraging that the next book announced was Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto For Change, which is on our August reading list. Authors Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi both attended Cambridge University and write about the challenges they faced as people of colour at such a traditional yet revered institution.
The Merky Books Instagram account is a great place to find reading ideas centred around race and identity in the U.K.
Sceptre
Sceptre is a literary imprint of Hodder & Stoughton that has been publishing fiction and non-fiction works by writers from all over the world, for over thirty years. Their main mission is to uncover new and exciting voices in literature, and offer a wide range of choice to readers. It’s clear from looking through their select catalogue that Sceptre provides an opportunity to explore new perspectives, deepen your knowledge or simply satisfy your imagination through reading.
We’ve already got our hands on My Past Is A Foreign Country by Zeba Talkani and have added Starling Days (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan) and Deeds Not Words (Helen Pankhurst) to our TBR list. Follow them on Instagram.
