‘Men need liberation too': do we need more male novelists?

The Guardian

31-05-2025

Jude Cook, author and publisher of Conduit BooksIn Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the languid Lord Henry announces: 'There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.'
I'm not so sure. During the days after the announcement of my new small press, Conduit Books, the conversation about the balance and representation of women and men in publishing roared back into life. The reason was that, initially at least, Conduit Books will publish literary fiction and memoir by male authors; a modest attempt to address the relatively recent scarcity of young or new male writers in the small world of UK fiction.
By and large, the response to the press has been positive and encouraging, with more than 1,000 submissions from around the world (some of which are from men called Reaper Hound or Silent Oath, names their parents might not have given them). We've received support from many female novelists (and vocal feminists), as well as women working in publishing. There have been comment pieces across the media.
Inevitably, there has been pushback, but also valid criticism asking whether such a press is necessary. There has also been a very small amount of abuse, and attempts to align the press with the toxic axis of Donald Trump and Andrew Tate and the so-called men's rights movement. This was wearying, though perhaps predictable. My own politics are certainly not anti-woke and do not align in any way with that sorry swamp of hate. I turned down a TV interview with GB News as I felt they wanted to talk less about literature and more about the spurious culture wars, with the danger that the debate might have been twisted into an adversarial contest between male and female authors and how much space they have been afforded, now and historically.
The fact is, a cursory look at the current literary scene will reveal that new male authors, for complex reasons, are not getting through. In April 2025, the Bookseller's top 10 fiction picks for the month included no men whatsoever. The all-female literary prize longlist or shortlist has become more common – current examples are the longlist for the inaugural Climate fiction prize, and the shortlist for the 2025 Encore award for a second novel. Having just judged a literary prize (the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses), I know that all those long- and shortlisted entries were the best books. It's too important (for both author and publisher) for it to be otherwise.
There was never any nefarious plot to exclude male authors, but the judges can only draw books from what's available. The situation is merely symptomatic of the way publishing has evolved over the last 15 years. Roughly 80% of fiction commissioning editors are women, and it's understandable they want work that resonates with them. And this often divides along gender lines. After all, to publish literary fiction, which doesn't usually sell unless it has been prize-nominated or gains word-of-mouth traction, is often to put your job on the line.
Fifty-two years ago, the brilliant Virago began publishing books by women with the intention of addressing inequalities in the wider society, many of which are still with us. Conduit Books doesn't have a political or polemical dimension. After 3,000 years of patriarchy, no one is pretending men are hard done by or not represented in the arts. But there is the pressing problem of what young men read, especially given the current political climate. There are liberal and progressive narratives addressing fatherhood, masculinity, working-class male experience, and negotiating the 21st century as a man, that are simply not getting published. I would like to read them. I would also rather young men read these than the internet. I have an eight-year-old son. I worry about what he will be reading in a few years' time.
I'm still not sure whether Wilde was right. To the trolls I say, there's no shortage of real misogynists and racists out there. Maybe go after them instead? In the meantime, grown-up debate is welcome. Conduit Books was started in good faith, and I'm excited at the prospect of bringing some outstanding fiction and memoir into the world that might otherwise have been passed by.
Jacob's Advice by Jude Cook is published by Unbound. Submissions to Conduit Books are open until 31 May at conduitbooks.co.uk
Anne Enright, author
I am sure other people will point out that women doing well, or even better, for two good seconds after millennia of oppression should not be declared a crisis in masculinity – why would it be? Also that male writers continue to do very well when it comes to prestige (there were more men called Paul on the 2023 Booker shortlist than there were women, and all that). The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women. My own feminism has always included men, however the conversation about gender has been one-sided for too long, so I am delighted to see them joining in.
You could argue that one of the purposes of fiction is liberation, and men need that too. As a form, the novel loves going beneath the surface and it loves an underdog – Irish writers have always known it is great at lifting people up. So I would say to a men-only press, 'Go for it!', with one or two thoughts on the side.
More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don't see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days. That said, all writing involves an amount of self-belief, even of self-aggrandisement, and I have also seen sadness and uncertainty in young male talent looking to find a way through.
Given the fact that there are a gazillion books by men out there already, the men-only thing may be less a statement about gender in late capitalism than a marketing ploy. I hope it is more than that. I hope this new press brings something to the party. I hope it captures and reinvigorates a male readership. It will be interesting to see which authors are keen to be published by such a press, and what they have to say.
The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright is published by Vintage.
Nikesh Shukla, authorIf you want to know how young men are engaging with fiction, with books, with popular culture, ask children's writers, ask YA writers. We do weekly visits up and down the country, and I honestly don't know who is better placed than a teacher or school librarian to talk about men's reading habits.
I remember once visiting a boys' school to talk about my novel The Boxer. My talk, about the racist attack that spurred me on to learn to box, about mental health, about softness and vulnerability, about how anger can be a positive force when channelled by the right people, always goes down well. That one day, I was told to use up the full hour with talking because the boys wouldn't really be interested and they wouldn't be asking questions. However, I could feel the energy in the room, them leaning forward as I told my story. And so, halfway through, wanting to bring them into the conversation, I asked if any of them had any questions. A kid put up his hand and asked what product I used in my hair, and before I could answer, someone at the school sent the boy out of the room. Apparently that wasn't a question to ask an author. I asked that he not be sent out, and noted that he was just making a connection, and I told him I used [redacted] in my hair.
It struck me as an interesting moment. The position of author is a revered one. An elite one. I was told afterwards that not many authors visited this school because it couldn't afford to pay them. And I understood that perhaps the thing that's acting as a barrier to boys is the institution of literature itself. It's seen as elitist. As white, middle class, something for other people. Because not enough authors are going into schools and talking to these kids and making connections.
I'm interested in what Conduit Books does and how it plans to engage with its audience. Finding and publishing the books isn't even half the battle; if anything, it's only a small fraction. It's finding the audience and engaging with them on their terms that's most of the battle. Ask any children's or YA author.
Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla is published by Bluebird.
Leo Robson, authorAnyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be 'too female'. When the literary critic FR Leavis set out his 'great tradition' in the late 1940s, he identified four 'great English novelists', only two of whom were English: Jane Austen and George Eliot. He was using his favoured formulation to mean something quite specific: 'the tradition to which what is great in English fiction belongs', something native and distinctive which he called 'a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity'. Leavis named one, more recent, writer: DH Lawrence. Finally, an English-born male! But Angela Carter, writing a little over a decade later, insisted on Lawrence's ''feminine' qualities: sensitivity, vulnerability and perception'. (Lawrence's tragedy, she wrote, is that 'he thought he was a man'.)
There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women's prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men (all six of Murdoch's first-person novels are written from a male perspective). Any such list today would include Deborah Levy, Zadie Smith, Gwendoline Riley, Claire-Louise Bennett, Bernardine Evaristo.
Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself. When I judged the Goldsmiths prize, we ended up with an all-male shortlist, and refused to apologise. Perhaps it's true that fiction has recently been dominated by female writers: publishing is too amorphous to determine these patterns with real authority, and certainly no one could read enough to decide if the dominance is legitimate. But as a male reader and writer, I feel no cause for complaint, or hunger for correction.
The Boys by Leo Robson is published by Riverrun.
Sarah Moss, authorThe idea of 'correcting' women's domination of literary fiction is troubling. Since Frances Burney and Jane Austen, women have been the novel's primary readers and writers. As Austen points out in Northanger Abbey, fiction was often disparaged for its femininity. The more serious genres of sermons and self-improvement handbooks of her era fret that young women waste too much time hiding in their bedrooms reading romances that lead to unrealistic expectations of men and marriage, and there's deep suspicion about what women might get up to between the printed sheets. Novels have always been where women go wild.
I suspect that if there is a problem with men's literary fiction, it's as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction: mostly rational, quantifiable truths about science, history and politics, though also sometimes travel and life writing, almost always by men. If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that's quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men's publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.
I've sometimes offered students a false binary (all binaries are false): some novels are mirrors, showing us ourselves in a different light; some are windows, letting us in to unfamiliar worlds. As a teenager I read the big dicks of the 1990s, partly, in retrospect, because I wanted to know how men thought, though also because some of them wrote excellent sentences. I could not see that their perspective was so normalised I had no need to go looking.
That reading might have been less harmful to me had my interest been reciprocated. Mostly men don't read fiction by women and they certainly don't buy it. (There are exceptions, don't write in. I live with three of them.) Older men sometimes write to me saying that while they would never normally dream of picking up a novel and especially not one by a woman, their wife insisted that they try mine and actually it's surprisingly good. They thought I'd like to know. Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women's experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.
All binaries are false. Intersectionality matters, and gender is rarely our most important characteristic. It's easier to think and write from another gender than another class or national or racial perspective.
That said, I'm all in favour of men doing the work on masculinity, toxic and otherwise. Men need space and support to explore emotions beyond anger, to be open and curious about their own and others' lives, to try out other eyes and other voices, all of which fiction might plausibly do. I've no objection to men having a room of their own, as long as they do their own housework.
Ripeness by Sarah Moss is published by Picador.