Do we really need more male novelists?

There may not be obvious successors to the likes of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie among today’s hotshot young writers. But is a new publisher dedicated to ‘overlooked’ male voices necessary?

"Where have all the literary blokes gone?" is a question that has popped up in bookish discussions and op-eds from time to time in recent years. Who are this generation’s hotshot young male novelists, the modern incarnations of the Amis/McEwan/Rushdie crew of the 80s?

The question flared again this week as writer Jude Cook launched a new press, Conduit Books, which plans to focus, at least initially, on publishing male authors.

Cook says the publishing landscape has changed “dramatically” over the last 15 years as a reaction to the “toxic male-dominated” scene of the 80s, 90s and 00s. Now, excitement in publishing circles centres on a “new breed of young female authors, spearheaded by Sally Rooney et al”. While this is “only right as a timely corrective”, the side-effect is that male authors are “often overlooked”, their voices deemed problematic.

Are male novelists actually in decline? Some metrics certainly say so: of all the writers to appear on the weekly Sunday Times bestseller lists for fiction hardbacks so far this year, just a third are men.

To read the full article on theguardian.com, click here