What can right-wing authors do?

Writing has always been a lonely business, publishing a cruel one. We aspiring novelists know that better than anyone. (Which of us hasn’t scrolled through endless Famous Writers Who Got Rejected blog posts, taking a perverse sort of pride in receiving more No Thank Yous than William Golding and J.K. Rowling combined?) Given the sheer number of query letters literary agents are swamped with every week, how is our literary potential — assuming, of course, that we have any — ever to be spotted?

These days, though, there’s an even greater obstacle in our path: left-leaning gatekeepers. And when I say leaning, I mean tumbling. For those of us who don’t subscribe to the latest ideological fads, the chances of seeing our books in the hands of readers who don’t share our name or flat have grown depressingly slim.

When researching agents and publishers for my children’s book, for instance, I found very few who did not explicitly ask for stories by or at least featuring disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, ethnically diverse or feminist voices. If only I’d penned a middle-grade novel about two feisty trans-girls of Nigerian extraction on their first trip to the moon in a wheelchair. Whether masterly or not, my own manuscript, with its podgy, posh, wannabe-centurion narrator, was bound to be dismissed out of hand for its lack of “diversity”. It’s difficult not to become disheartened.

I was therefore delighted when earlier this year The New Culture Forum (NCF) announced its first Literary Festival. It promised aspiring authors both practical guidance and the presence of publishers. Announcing the festival on GB News, the director and founder Peter Whittle said, quite rightly, that there would be no point to it unless it helped non-woke writers to get published: ‘it can’t just be a talking shop.’

To read the full article on thecritic.co.uk, click here