UK indie press to publish only women writers in 2018

UK independent publisher And Other Stories will only publish books by women writers in 2018 following author Kamila Shamsie’s call for publishers to help redress the gender bias in the literary world, reports the Guardian. And Other Stories releases 10 to 12 new titles each year, and this year is publishing seven books by men and four by women. Senior editor Sophie Lewis said she expected the press would be ‘rescheduling male writers’ books for other years [and] digging harder and further than usual, in order to find the really good women’s writing that we want to publish’ in 2018. Publisher Stefan Tobler said: ‘We’ve realised for a while that we’ve published more men than women. We have a wide range of people helping us with our choices, and our editors are women … and yet somehow we still publish more books by men than women.’ In an article in the Guardian, Shamsie wrote that just under 40% of books submitted to the Booker Prize over the past five years were by women, and called for ‘a Year of Publishing Women’.

Category: International news