I read all submissions; every single one.

What is noticeable, when going through these manuscripts, is that a substantial number are (for our appetite) addressed to the wrong reader. The author has written about their community, carefully, lovingly, with evident knowledge; then aimed the text squarely at someone who has never lived inside that community. A tourist trip. The community in question would find the work, at best, a little patronising, at worst, irrelevant.

This is a critical obstacle; an immediate rejection from M2M Books. And the shame is that I often feel this author from an underrepresented community is so completely conditioned to write for the mainstream that they are oblivious to doing it.

This is why I say these words again and again to every writer I meet:

Before writing a word, think long and hard about who the imagined reader is.

When we put our poetry anthology, I Zig and I Zag, together, we did not think about the reader who would need a map. Masaka Madeda’s poem does not offer guidance; a hundred pages of a Kenyan man walking the Malindi coast, observing, remembering, entirely at home in his own reference points. Love and Happiness was written the same way; Harriet Bush’s story is told without the explanatory scaffolding mainstream publishing tends to require before it will touch a subject like trans-racial adoption.

There is a version of both these books that does not exist. The version where Masaka Madeda pauses every few pages to explain what the Taita Hills are and why they matter; where Harriet Bush’s experience of being Black and adopted in white Cheshire is held up to the light for a reader who has never been near the adoption experience. Those versions would have been perfectly publishable. They would also have been, for the reader inside either experience, like embarking on a guided tour of their own front room. 

I Zig and I Zag and Love and Happiness are the versions that think only about the reader who knows; the adoptee who encounters Harriet Bush and finds, possibly for the first time, that this novel is not explaining the adoption experience, sanitised and fantasied, for someone else’s comfort.

What we hoped for, and what has resulted, is that most readers who come to these books from outside these experiences do not report getting something lesser from the books. They overwhelmingly describe a more emotional and memorable experience, more akin to going on holiday and staying with a local family rather than confined within the perfectly painted walls of an all-inclusive hotel; the friction, the specificity, the slight vertigo of being somewhere that was not arranged for the outsider’s comfort and convenience. They felt like they had shared something unmediated, authentic, more intimate, and more powerful. The all-inclusive resort, it turns out, is not the real deal.

The mainstream UK publishing industry knows precisely who they publish for. The reader they have in mind is not from where you’re from. The question is whether they comprehend what they’re missing when so focused on a single audience.

If your manuscript addresses a reader from a community marginalised in UK publishing, then we are eager to read your work. We seek literary fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and poetry collections. We read everything submitted, without exception, without a closing date, without a stack abandoned when the submission window shuts.

Further information here.

For a payday, apparently.

Last Sunday, I was a Black person at the Hay Festival, there for a payday – a book-review panel in the BBC Marquee. Finished, checked out the site, did a little maths as I walked.

Subtract the artists and their guests. Subtract the staff. What remains is a large crowd so white that it reflects no part of Britain I have ever heard of (I live in west Wales and know what an ethnically meagre landscape looks like). I expect the 2026 Reform Party conference to be considerably more ethnically diverse than the 2026 Hay Festival.

What would Hay have to do to make their literary festival more diverse? was the question that Sairah, my volunteer carer, asked amid my moaning and groaning. Not complicated, was my reply. Highlight books and host talks about books written for readers of colour.

We had already noted that the festival bookshop featured a fair few books about the Black experience, but slim pickings for Black readers. Likewise, the speakers and topics occasionally spoke of the Black experience, but never with a Black audience in mind. The distinction matters. And until this distinction is addressed and resolved, why would Black people choose to go to Hay?

British publishing rarely considers audiences beyond the narrowest band of mainstream readers, we know that. Hay is the product of the industry thinking and working this way. Bottom line, if you really want to know what the one imagined reader for UK publishing looks like, check out the 2026 Hay Festival.

The question Sairah asked was what Hay would have to do. The more critical question is why they have not already done it. The answer? the Hay crowd is not an accident – it is UK publishing policy.

Gareth James | Chief Reader

My mistake was reading the comments. Screwed up the cooled-out Saturday morning vibe entirely.

First, a white writer/artist had a question. “Will you also be running fellowships for people who are not ethnically diverse but might face different barriers in the publishing industry?”

Two comments down, a ’Reading Group Leader and Literature Specialist’, presumably white, had another: “What exactly does ‘ethnically diverse’ mean in this context, and does it purposefully exclude white native Britons?”

Between them, nine people considered these interventions to be likeable. They are not likeable. They are the same insidious idea, dressed up somewhat differently.

Start with the second, because it is the more transparent of the two. “What exactly does ‘ethnically diverse’ mean in this context” performs a level of confusion the announcement does not warrant. Bloomsbury’s writing fellowship is designed for writers who identify as Black, Asian, or ethnically diverse. The phrase appears in plain English in the third line of the fellowship’s description. A ‘Literature Specialist’ possesses the reading skills to parse this simple sentence. The question is not genuine – it’s resentful.

Then there is “white native Britons”. Native is clearly not a neutral term here. Native implies prior claim; rootedness by birthright; a belonging that pre-dates, and therefore outranks the belonging of others. Native frames Bloomsbury’s writing fellowship not as a correction to structural disadvantage but as a transfer of opportunity away from the people who were here first (irony alert, at 61, there’s every chance I’ve lived here longer than they have). This kind of predictable ‘they’re the problem we’re facing’ framing has a long history in right wing narratives and does not become less pointed when appearing in a LinkedIn comment beneath a publishing announcement. However resentful some individuals may feel, there is one thing we can be certain of – if a white British writer struggles to get published, it isn’t because a writer from an ethnically diverse background got their spot.

The first question seems softer in register. The questioner does not invoke nativeness or prior claim; she queries fairness. “Different barriers in the publishing industry”. Yes, class is a barrier. Geography is a barrier. Disability is a barrier. So what? None of these issues are relevant to a fellowship targeting ethnic underrepresentation. They are arguments for additional fellowships targeting those things. UK publishing has several. The Spread the Word London Writers Awards supports disabled, LGBTQ+, and working-class applicants across four genres. Curtis Brown Creative’s Breakthrough Writers Programme includes low-income writers and disabled writers. The TLC Free Reads Scheme offers manuscript assessments to writers from low-income households. The National Centre for Writing runs bursaries tied to financial need. A door opening for one group does not close one for another. The logic of “what about other barriers” only functions if you believe support for writers currently underrepresented in UK publishing is zero-sum, or an act of benevolence. It is neither. Mainstream publishers will figure out eventually that it’s in their financial interest to diversify their audience beyond one imagined reader.

Now consider what these questions would look like elsewhere. Imagine either comment appearing under the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, which champions women and non-binary writers: what exactly does “women” mean in this context, and does it purposefully exclude men? Imagine them under Wellspring, the professional development programme for disabled and neurodivergent playwrights: will there be a version for able-bodied and neurotypical writers? Imagine them under the Disabled Playwright Support Programme run by Playwrights’ Studio Scotland: will people without disabilities who struggle with confidence get their own scheme? These questions would read as highly inappropriate and obviously misplaced.

The evidence base for this fellowship’s necessity is uncontested. The Publishers Association’s workforce surveys track the facts directly. As recently as 2024, ethnic minority staff represented 15% of the publishing workforce; down from 17% in 2022, with a specific decline in the numbers of Asian and British Asian staff. Narrow the lens from the workforce broadly to the editorial relationships that decide what gets published and how it is positioned, and the picture sharpens. The Rethinking Diversity in Publishing report, produced by Goldsmiths in partnership with Spread the Word and The Bookseller, drew on interviews across the industry and found that publishers conceive their core audience as white and middle-class, and that this assumption shapes decisions at every stage: acquisition, editorial, marketing, retail. Earlier research, drawing on Labour Force Survey data, found publishing to be the whitest of all the creative sectors. The gains since then are modest. The skewed structure persists.

This Bloomsbury fellowship addresses something specific within UK publishing: the deficit of editorial relationships, institutional confidence, and mentored access that shapes who arrives at a publishable manuscript with the support to pitch it. One fellowship, one recipient, one year of mentorship, £1,000. A small correction; not to the industry structure, but to one person’s trajectory, in one year.

What neither comment engages with is any sense of factual reality concerning UK publishing. The data is in the public domain. But then, both comments are not really about the writing fellowship. They are about discomfort.

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression – anon

Unexamined discomfort is not malice; it’s not benign either. And when dressed in the language of fairness or confusion, discomfort becomes something that functions, whatever the intention, as hostility towards addressing a well-documented and long-standing diversity problem within UK publishing.

Bloomsbury, for their part, have not yet responded directly to negative comments beneath their own post. Disappointing. There is a phrase about talking the talk and walking the walk that applies here.

White people; take some responsibility and police your own community; every other group is expected to do so. So when you see comments like these, they’re not unusual, wade in. Don’t leave it to other communities to conduct your own housekeeping. The least you can do is make the comments section slightly less dispiriting.

Pens at the ready, Black and brown writers; the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship opens for submissions 1 July.

Gareth James – Chief Reader

Deep inside The National Library of Wales, in one of those rooms with suspect acoustics and uncomfortable chairs, I sat alongside Alex Wharton and Jade E. Bradford and we talked about writing for well over an hour.

We spoke about what it costs to write when you work full time and have a life. About first drafts that are supposed to be terrible, and what reading has to do with writing, and whether the two are separable at all.

Jade wants, she said, the permission to be radically boring. The right to write about ordinary life without that life being read as a statement of identity.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know why that permission is difficult to obtain. The mainstream expectation of the Black experience has a shape. We explain. We translate and tone down. We make the particular legible to a reader who arrives from outside our experience. That shape is commercially proven and culturally rewarded but irrelevant to the readers the book is actually about.

The full panel discussion is available above and is entirely worth your time.

Gareth James | M2M Books

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

👨🏾‍💻 We rebuilt our website this week because there is a moment when you’re building anything, when the question changes. You stop asking whether it looks right and start asking whether it works. Ours was this: if Harriet Bush walked in, could she find her own story?

Harriet is the protagonist of Love and Happiness; a trans-racial adoptee in North West England in the 1970s and 80s. Her story is not a case study. It is hers. The test was whether a reader who already knows that life could find the book quickly; without being made to feel they were the subject of someone else’s education.

The same question applied to Masaka Madeda, whose poem is the spine of I Zig and I Zag. One sequence. 100 pages. Does the website give this epic the space it needs?

We are a small press. Based in Tre Taliesin, population a few hundred. We are not competing with Faber. What we are doing is publishing books FOR marginalised communities; not about them for a mainstream reading list. The website starts from that assumption. The reader it imagines is already inside the experience.

Print and ebook, direct from us: m2mbooks.com

The myriad steep cast-iron stairs of London Olympia would be a struggle for an old fella’ not used to the Welsh hills. They are everywhere. The London Book Fair occupies the whole building, level upon level; stands and banners, bright lights and the kind of ambient noise and hurlyburly that makes it difficult to detect where one conversation begins and another ends. I had my complimentary invitation somewhere near the bottom of my bag, my simple pitch in my head (books about Black people are not the same as books for Black people), and a vague knowledge of, I think, two people in the building. First day at primary school. In central London. In March.

The concept behind Margin to Margin Books had resulted in a shortlisting for the 2026 London Book Fair Trailblazers Award. On the 12th of March, 1:45pm on the main stage, alongside real proper book people, I collected a very fancy certificate. The ceremony lasted about twenty minutes. Quite exciting. The rest of the day was footwork; stand to stand, conversation to conversation, telling anyone who’d hold still for a moment what M2M Books is actually about; why I’m so committed to the project; what we publish; who we publish for; not a difficult concept to grasp. I spent all day this way – planting seeds. 

I got back home to Wales on the Friday. The same day the submission window for the Margin to Margin Anthology closed.

Writing rejection emails is an aspect of publishing that nothing can prepare you for. The writers on the receiving end of these negative notes trusted us with their work; no small matter. Some submissions needed more time and more work. Some weren’t the right fit for this anthology. I’m not going to give more explanation; editorial decisions require no public justification. What I’ll say is this: the writers we couldn’t include this time are not staring at a closed door. Hopefully, just a deferred conversation.

The writers we accepted have set the foundations of the anthology. Twenty-eight contributors. The beginning and the end are locked. The middle is still finding its order; there’s a moment in curating any collection when it stops being a list and starts being a sequence, when you can feel the shape of the book taking form beneath the individual pieces. We’re close to that moment. Not there yet. Close.

Forms. Each new publishing project triggers an avalanche of required paperwork. Contracts; grant applications; budget lines; schedules; ISBNs. Getting a book into the real world is less like releasing something and more like a detailed application for permission to exist. I say this without complaint (mostly). The infrastructure exists for good reason. But the pathway between a poem arriving in my inbox and that poem existing in a book a writer can hold in their hands, is longer and more administrative than most people would imagine. We’ve completed the forms. That bit’s done.

Last Saturday, I was back in Aberystwyth, planting seeds at the National Library of Wales, for a Black Literature Panel organised by Kumbu Kumbu. On the panel with me: Alex Wharton, Children’s Laureate Wales 2023–25; and Jade E. Bradford, a writer from Barry, whose work has been recognised by Literature Wales and the Black British Book Festival. Linking up with established Black writers is a special treat. I spend most of my time discussing the range of communities M2M publishes for. This event was all about mine. We spoke for ninety minutes about Black Welsh writing; about what it means to write for our community rather than for an imagined outside observer; about Welshness, language and belonging. These conversations continued long after the mics went off. Valuable exchanges, alone worth turning up for.

Easter this week. The pace shifts. But there are plenty of tasks still to finalise, two children’s books, a second anthology to produce, a novel set in south Wales in the pipeline. The work won’t stop. 

Whether the seeds I planted at Olympia and the National Library will take root, who knows. At home, the tomato and lettuce seeds are sprouting. Unfortunately, I’m yet to spot any shoots from the sweet peas. This is how it goes.

There’s an exciting submission sitting atop my submissions folder. Came in on Tuesday, little in terms of a covering note beyond the basics, three poems that assumed I was familiar with the experience they were describing. I did recognise the experience. And that’s the point. We’ve been open since January; we close Friday 13 March; and in this final week of submissions for our next multi-community anthology, I still get a buzz of excitement when this most assumed style of writing falls across my desk.

We’ve read bundles since January. Poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, plus some work that resists categorisation and is generally better for it. The breadth of writing we’ve consumed has been broader than Broadway; the quality, remarkably high. What separates the work that stops us in our tracks, from the work that doesn’t, isn’t craft, exactly (though craft matters). It’s the direction the writing faces.

The work we’ve turned down this round isn’t lacking. Much is careful, considered, well-intentioned, but then pauses to make sure an outsider is following, glances over its shoulder to check the reader is keeping up. That glance is a disqualifying tell; it means the writer has imagined a reader who needs the experience explained, and so has written towards them. We’re not that publisher. We’re the one that never offers that sort of direction.

We publish work that assumes its reader to be the insider. Poetry that doesn’t tone down or interpret its own language. Prose that doesn’t contextualise for the uninitiated. If that is the work you’ve been sitting on, please send it to us. Margin to Margin Books are a small press and we read everything.

The Anthology submission window closes Friday 13 March 2026.

📣 If you know a writer who should be submitting their creative writing to M2M Books, please point them in our direction. The poetry and prose we’re looking for doesn’t always find its way to us without a gentle nudge from someone who recognises it.

The question at the heart of Margin to Margin Books is not complicated to state. There is a difference between publishing for marginalised communities and publishing about marginalised experience; between putting a reader from the margins at the centre of every editorial decision and producing books about that reader’s life for someone else’s consumption. That distinction shapes everything we do — what we commission, how we edit, what we put on a jacket, what we will consider success.

It sounds straightforward. In practice it sets M2M Books apart from almost everything else currently happening in mainstream publishing.

Our founding essay, now live on Substack, makes the full argument. It begins somewhere most readers from marginalised communities will recognise immediately — the book that is apparently written for you, that turns out to have been written about you, for someone else entirely. It moves through what that pattern reveals about how mainstream publishing actually works, who is doing the curating and for whom, and why goodwill alone has never been sufficient to change much.

The essay also introduces M2M Books properly — our two titles in print, the five arriving later in 2026, our recent London Book Fair Trailblazer shortlisting, and what this Substack is for. Not a newsletter in the conventional sense; a space where we think in public about books, decisions, and the wider argument about who literature serves.

The gap between what the publishing industry says it values and what it offers is wide enough to build a press in. That is precisely what is happening here.

The founding essay is at Margin to Margin on Substack. Subscribe there to follow the argument as it develops.

Gareth James
M2M Books | Chief Reader

The submission window for our second anthology closes in two weeks. Friday 13th March. That’s it. If you’ve been sitting on a poem, a short story, or an essay — and wondering whether to send it to us — this is the moment to stop wondering.

Margin to Margin (working title) will be our second multi-community collection, following I Zig and I Zag, and will be published in late 2026. We’re looking for poetry, narrative fiction, and personal essays from writers whose communities sit at the edges of what English-language literature usually notices. Not work about that experience, written for a mainstream audience. Work from inside, written for the people who live there.

We launched M2M Books in 2024 with a clear conviction: that marginalised communities deserve their own internal libraries — literature that offers solace, resilience, and intellectual armour, neither explanation nor apology. That conviction has not changed. The importance of our mission has been recognised this month in our shortlisting for the 2026 London Book Fair Trailblazer Awards. But nominations do not build libraries. Writers do.

If your work is ready; edited, redrafted, as good as you can make it; we want to read it.

Read M2M Books submission guidelines and FAQs, then send your manuscript to info@m2mbooks.com
Deadline: Friday 13th March 2026.

We’re waiting.

Gareth James | Chief Reader