Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

you are living on the poverty line. All the things that would feed you 

as a writer – lectures or writers’ groups – cost something. If you are 

truly broke, it’s too much. There are loads of things that sustain you 

as writer from going to events to buying books that you can’t do 

without money. Literature isn’t free. If you are poor or have difficulty 

or disability it will impact on your writing. Being middle class and 

taking a year off or living at home makes it easier. You are fed as a 

writer – emotionally and physically and intellectually – with money 

and connections. If you live in Doncaster what are the chances 

you know someone in Notting Hill? The further you are from the 

network, the more hurdles there are to overcome. It’s harder if you 

aren’t brought up in a literary atmosphere. There is also the subject 

matter. If you want to write about the edge, the marginalised world, 

I’m not convinced that publishers realise and understand the market 

for that sort of work. Are those stories valued? Clearly, sometimes 

they are – some books get through. But in publishing houses, who 

are the readers, the decision makers? Until we have more inclusion 

within the publishing industry then the readers and editors are largely 

coming from a white, middle class background. This is not to say that 

working class and marginalised writers have to always write about 

their experiences. We will have true equality when the refugee writer 

can get his romantic fiction published and the working class writer his 

gothic sci-fi thriller. Like everyone else, we want to write about what 

we want to write about.

This underscores the point that almost all literary publishing is 

concentrated on London. The major publishers are in London. All but 

one of the Independent Alliance are in London. The newspapers and 

reviews are based in London. Decisions are made in London. There is 

little sign that any of these things will change in future – and given the 

nature of author earnings, the fact that London is the most expensive 

part of the UK doesn’t bode well for quality of life as a writer. Still, 

there are positive indications that literature is starting to build networks 

outside the M25 – the flourishing of independent publishers from Galley 

Beggar in Norwich to Bluemoose Books in Hebden Bridge, the launch of 

the Northern Fiction Alliance, and the existence of writer development 

agencies such as New Writing North in Newcastle, Writing West 

Midlands in Birmingham and Writers’ Centre Norwich are all evidence 

of a centrifugal force in literary writing. Yet those do not in themselves 

imply widespread support for literary writing outside the capital. 

One way of looking at this is through the prism of insider networks. 

Virtually no one is suggesting that the literary world is consciously racist, 

or even class-biased. More likely is that people work through available 

networks and such networks, wherever they are, tend to cluster around 

similar backgrounds. This means that membership of the literary insider 

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