Twenty-five years ago, I named our first son, Jem (my daughter only just dodged ‘Scout’). I had grown up convinced To Kill a Mockingbird was a text integral to me as a Black person. I now know that this canonic story of American racism was not written for me at all; I’m not American, and even as an infant I was well aware that racism is horrible. A closer read reveals that Tom Robinson’s characterisation serves not as subject, but as an object, a plot device that enables white character developments. In a nutshell, I finally noticed that books written about marginalised communities are not the same as books written for marginalised communities.
I should have spotted this distinction sooner; a vivid memory from primary school, as the only Black child in my class, was being routinely exposed to tuneless renditions of ‘The Ink is Black, the Paper is White’; humiliation and my ethnicity unhelpfully highlighted. A ditty, not composed for the Black kid, but to educate the white children that somehow all races are on the same team. The irony? I’m certain the teacher thought they were doing me the favour.
Like my teacher, UK publishing has for decades treated ‘for’ and ‘about’ as synonymous. They’re not. And those working in the book business should know ‘words matter’ more than anyone. Especially when the distinction between the two is where significant progress in their diversity, equality, and inclusion initiatives can be found
Diversity Shelves Are Not For Us
Browse the titles on any ‘Black British’ bookshelf. What do they have in common? Slavery. Racism. Migration as suffering. The wounds inflicted by injustice. The struggle to overcome. Now ask: who is learning from these themes? Who is the imagined reader sitting across from the author, being patiently educated? Not Black readers. Black people did not need Beloved to tell them that slavery was a human catastrophe. They were not waiting for Girl, Woman, Other to confirm that marginalisation is complex and painful. Black readers need no lessons in the daily realities of endemic racism. These books explain the Black experience to people who have never lived it. This is not the same as serving the communities the texts represent.
The same argument can be made for all communities marginalised by UK publishing.
But we take what we can get, it seems. Those of us from marginalised communities have been well-trained to feel grateful for any books that feature characters that look like us, and to treat critique of the diversity canon as ingratitude, or worse, betrayal. We know what we’re supposed to say: these books matter, they opened doors, they made us visible. Questioning them feels like pulling at a strand that holds the whole project together.
The career arc of Colson Whitehead tells us everything we need to know about what narratives the publishing industry values. His early novels; The Intuitionist, a noir-adjacent story using lift inspectors as a metaphor for racial progress; Zone One, a literary zombie novel, both earned critical respect but modest mainstream reach. Then he wrote The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both centred on slavery and racial violence, and won back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes. The publishing machine rewarded Colson most lavishly precisely when he was writing about Black suffering.
The problem is that the ‘diverse’ books published, that win prizes, that we’re told are essential reading, are almost always written for an imagined reader who is white, middle class, straight, neurotypical, and non-disabled – a fraction of the book-buying population. Why? Because books commissioned, promoted, and pressed into the eager hands of marginalised communities are being chosen, overwhelmingly, by people who are not from those communities. In practice, they are commissioning about ‘exotic’ communities, for the ‘mainstream’; then calling the skewed process representation. I might call it bait and switch. This is not a matter of spite, quality or taste. It is the cultural disconnect between who the books were intended to represent and who has been making the decisions.
The Cost
For marginalised readers, repeatedly consuming narratives centred on their own oppression is not a neutral act. It is neither educational nor a leisure activity. A Black reader working through Beloved is not only encountering great literature; they are required to inhabit, in sustained imaginative detail, the degradation and destruction of people who look like them; whose suffering is the inheritance they currently carry. A queer teenager handed a reading list of coming-out trauma narratives is being asked to rehearse pain they may not yet have processed. This is traumatising.
Trauma-informed research is clear that there is a meaningful difference between processing pain in a supported context and being repeatedly exposed to traumatic material with no therapeutic purpose. A mainstream reading list offers no psychological support; does not ask whether the reader is ready; ripping open wounds and describing this as diverse culture. That marginalised readers keep engaging with this literature says something about availability and resilience; says nothing about whether UK publishing is serving these communities well.
The detrimental effect on younger readers from marginalised communities cannot be overstated. A Black child handed a reading list consisting entirely of books about slavery, the civil rights movement, and racial trauma is informed that books about people who look like them are always about their suffering. Small wonder so many conclude that reading simply isn’t for them.
Writers Know This
Filtering our narratives does not start at the acquisition meeting. It starts inside the writer, years earlier. Black British authors, and writers from other marginalised communities, are not naive about what UK publishers want and reward. They attend the same writing workshops, read the same prize lists, study the same rights announcements, and field the same notes from agents about what is and isn’t commercially viable right now. The message is consistent enough that many internalise the mainstream brief before they’ve written a word: write about the wound; make it legible; give them suffering in a form they can shelve and celebrate. Some writers resist this instruction and pay the price of rejection. Others adapt and we’ll never know what important literature might have been written instead. This is how UK publishing currently operates.
What makes this restrictive structure hard to shift are the underlying economics. Trauma narratives from marginalised writers are more legible to the UK acquisitions culture; more legible means an easier argument to make to the sales team; easy argument means a larger advance and a bigger marketing budget. A larger advance and bigger budget feel, from the inside, like validation of the process. The literary prize confirms their choices. So, by the time the adapted book lands on the diversity table, everyone involved (agent, editor, publicist, critic) genuinely believes the choices made along the way were purely literary ones. This is the damning indictment; not bad faith, but a prejudiced structure so entrenched that good faith can operate freely within it.
Writers are not imagining the incentive to conform; the incentive to write for the mainstream is very real. The writer who follows the path to fortune and prizes is not a sellout – they correctly read the market. The same pattern holds across every marginalised community. LGBTQ+ literature celebrated in mainstream spaces is overwhelmingly coming-out narratives, or stories of violence and survival. Disabled writers who get published and promoted tend to be writing about disability as the defining subject. Indigenous authors are expected to write about colonisation. The instruction from publishing’s diversity agenda is clear and consistent: make your pain legible to people who haven’t experienced it.
A Different Way
There is a cleaner solution than diversity quotas, reading lists, or award categories, though these are the strategies rolled out, again and again, with each new cycle of industry self-examination. Publish for the marginalised audience. Not about them, not in their name, not as an act of representation composed for someone else’s gaze, but as the intended reader. When that becomes the starting point, the diverse writer problem resolves itself. Writers from that community find their way to publishers whose audience is their audience. No lists are drawn up. No writer from outside that community is told they cannot contribute, only that the reader comes first.
The logic doesn’t stop with the writer. A publishing house genuinely built around a marginalised readership acquires differently, yes; but it is also staffed differently. Commissioning editors, creative editors, proofreaders, cover artists, designers, all need to come from those communities too, because cultural fluency matters, and your reader will notice every false note. This is not a quota by another name. It is a quality argument. You cannot serve a readership you do not understand.
The most important consequence is what this model does for younger readers. Children’s and YA literature built on this principle; written for young Black readers, young queer readers, young disabled readers, as whole human beings with appetites for adventure, mystery, humour, and worlds far beyond their own, produces something the current system has never managed: young readers who feel that reading belongs to them. That is not a small thing. It is the whole thing. Because it is only from this cohort, young people who grew up with books composed for them, that the next generation of writers, editors, artists, and publishers from marginalised communities will come. Every other diversity initiative in publishing works backwards, retrofitting inclusion onto a structure built for someone else. This approach seeds the ground. The current model produces award ceremonies. This strategy results in a new publishing culture.
What Next?
Start with your own shelves. If your books featuring Black characters, or LGBTQ+ characters, or disabled characters, are mostly about those characters navigating oppression, ask why. Not out of guilt. Out of curiosity.
Go looking. There is extraordinary writing by Black authors, queer authors, disabled authors, and neurodivergent authors that is not about trauma; that is about life.
The diversity our bookshelves need is not more books explaining why marginalisation is bad. It is books that treat marginalised readers as readers with appetites, imagination, and an absolute right to stories written for them, not about them.
Such books are out there. More are being written, right now, by authors mainstream publishing has decided to ignore. The question is not whether these titles will eventually reach the diversity shelf. The question is whether the diversity shelf is where our stories belong.
Gareth James | Chief Reader | Margin to Margin Books