Introduction: Secularism and the literary marketplace

The last few years have witnessed a rising awareness across the media of the whiteness of Britain’s fiction publishing industry and an amplification of calls for racial diversity both within the workforce and within author lists. In 2015, shortly after the release of the allwhite authored list of books to be freely distributed across the UK for World Book Night 2016, The Guardian published a piece featuring a roster of British writers of colour critiquing the industry’s shameful record of race as well as class inclusivity (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p.; see also Flood 2015). Here, the words of trailblazing campaigner for Black, Asian, and People of Colour authors and Britain’s first female Black publisher, Margaret Busby, sit alongside those of relative newcomer Nikesh Shukla, whose own success as an anthologist and author has been accompanied by a tireless advocacy for a racially diverse literary marketplace (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p). In his contribution, Shukla alludes to his then forthcoming essay collection The Good Immigrant (Shukla 2016) whose publication in 2016 and commercial and critical success marked the beginning of a new shift – even a watershed moment – in the UK book industry. Together with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s (2017) chart-topping non-fiction book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Bernardine Evaristo’s (2019) history-making Booker Prize win Girl, Woman, Other, and Candice Carty-Williams’s (2019) novel Queenie, which won the British Book of the Year award in 2020, among others, Shukla’s high-profile collection helped to pave the way for a boom in books by Black and Brown writers. This was underpinned by new initiatives such as Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back list, curated by Evaristo and launched in 2021, and its WriteNow mentoring scheme for writers from under-represented backgrounds, established in 2016, as well as the inauguration of the Jhalak Prize for “British/British resident BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] writers” in 2017. This shift took place against the backdrop of the worldwide rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the racist murder of George Floyd in 2020. By then, book publishers evidently felt an imperative to speak out against racial violence: that race was their business, or, more cynically, that they could no longer afford to remain silent on matters of race. Penguin Random House, Hachette UK, Pan Macmillan, and HarperCollins all issued statements affirming their solidarity or allyship with racialized people and their commitment to inclusivity in the wake of Floyd’s murder (Saha and van Lente 2022, 1804–1805).