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Literary magazines are increasingly spotlighting diverse and debut authors, with many new publications focusing on their online offer and a more international outlook, say trade experts.
The publications are providing more of an outlet for underrepresented authors who don't feel supported elsewhere in publishing, reducing barriers while also providing a source of new talent, they say.
Hannah Chukwu, assistant editor at Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton, works on the publisher’s literary magazine, Five Dials, which has recently pivoted to only publishing underrepresented authors. She told The Bookseller the team made the radical change after the success of its debut author issue just before lockdown, where many of the writers were from diverse socioeconomic groups.
“As we were developing what that might mean for the magazine, how that could look, that’s where the more radical change came in where we were like, 'Actually, it makes a lot more sense for that to be the focus of the magazine.' If we’ve got this platform and we have a dedicated subscriber base and readership, actually it feels really valuable to be able to use that platform to elevate writers who aren’t getting the support they deserve elsewhere, and be able to shine a light on them through a platform that doesn’t feel so full of barriers in a way that mainstream publishing can be,” she said.
No-one who wants to write for Five Dials needs an agent, they simply need to submit work to the editors to be considered.
Chukwu (pictured, right) said there has been a “brilliant” response from readers: “It’s really encouraging because I think that can be a myth that choosing to focus on underrepresented writers could affect the quality. We know that’s completely untrue and we found that in the response to that first launch,” she said.
What Five Dials is doing isn’t new and recently a number of magazines have sprung up which also focus on particular groups of writers traditionally underrepresented on UK bookshelves.
Nancy Adimora is the talent and audience development manager at HarperCollins and also runs AFREADA, an African literary magazine she founded in 2015, which focuses exclusively on original short stories from established and emerging writers across Africa and its diaspora.
She told The Bookseller that creating her own magazine was “a no-brainer”. She said: “I knew there were so many sick writers who were writing on their personal blogs and that’s literally all they had. They had maybe 100 followers and nobody was really reading their stories except for their family members."
She said she didn’t feel “pressured” to have poetry or reviews seen in more traditional literary magazines such as the London Review of Books or the New Yorker, and is interested to see how the form develops: “The more literary magazines that exist, it lowers the barrier of entry. What I mean by that is you can just enter with a good story, you don’t need to have all these connections, you don’t need to have done an MA in creative writing. But when you’re able to say that I have been published here, even if it’s somewhere like AFREADA or somewhere like Bad Form, I feel like it gives writers the confidence to go off and submit to other magazines as well. A lot of the time when it comes to creative expression or creative work, you hear a lot of ‘nos’ and I think it’s really validating to hear your first 'yes', and that will inevitably spur you on to go on and pursue a longer career in the industry.”
Adimora says it’s “really heartwarming” when people she has published on AFREADA get agents and book deals, and cite the magazine in their biography. “A lot of the time we were the first people to accept their stories,” she said. The magazine is largely online to help with accessibility for its global audience, but it has also recently introduced a print offer at the end of the year.
This focus on online can also be seen at Bad Form, which launched in autumn 2019 and really took off after the Black Lives Matter movement last spring, as the magazine platforms writers from Black, Asian and racialised community backgrounds. Founder and editor Amy Baxter told The Bookseller that she puts "bookstagrammers" and online reviewers on a similar level to literary reviewers, and she doesn’t think there should be such a great divide between them.
“Often I’m only really sent quite literary titles to review on Bad Form, and it’s been a real active effort of ours to say actually we want the commercial titles too, the purpose of Bad Form is to platform all writers from Black, Asian and racialised community backgrounds for people who like to read them. And I don’t think the average reader really goes into a book knowing whether it’s super commercial or super literary unless you tell them it is either way. So I think there is perhaps an ancient hierarchy of which books get published in literary reviews and which books get published on 'bookstagram' online, and I think Bad Form is good in that we are trying to blur the lines between which are worthy of lengthy discussion rather than just a picture or a backgrounder.”
Around 25 articles are published online each month, and there is also a quarterly magazine. The next edition focuses on Caribbean literature and is guest-edited by editor and author Mireille Harper. Harper said she contacted Baxter with her ideas for the issue after seeing there wasn’t really a place “celebrating the diversity of all kinds of Caribbean literature in all its forms”. She said: "I know there are Caribbean reading and writing communities, but I didn’t feel like maybe so much in the UK that there was a literary review celebrating that.”
Speaking about the magazine's focus on debut authors, Baxter lamented: “As a platform that focuses on Black, Asian and racialised community writers, it is a necessity that we focus on debut authors. We would love to write on loads of established authors who have great sales records and would get us loads of interest like that. But unfortunately they don’t exist because the British publishing industry has not catered to those, it has not published those en masse enough that we can do that.”
It also has an impact on those scouting new talent. Seren Adams, an agent at United Agents, said she “loves” looking at slightly less mainstream magazines to find new writers, and recently signed a writer who had done a piece on online activism for It’s Freezing in LA to work on a non-fiction proposal. “I find that very exciting, and I’m grateful to the magazine. If they hadn’t published her I wouldn’t have seen or known about her,” she said.
“Obviously if it’s a bigger magazine like the New Yorker or the Paris Review, or even Granta, it’s unlikely that someone will be unrepresented by the time they have got published,” she said.
However, she noted that finding writers this way can be “risky”. She told The Bookseller: “You are just seeing a snippet of their work, you just get a glimpse of their writing style. It’s a real long-game thing. I think the way to find people when you are a junior person in the industry is to find them very early in their career and take the risk on them and support them, and see their writing as it develops. So it might be years before something comes to fruition.”
But with more literary magazines also creating awards, they are definitely seen by the industry as a good place to find innovative and emerging talent. The editors at the White Review, widely praised for their renowned short story competition, told The Bookseller they "definitely" think the literary magazine, in all its guises, is here to stay.
They said: "Particularly during a time of content overload, where quantity often takes precedence over quality, there is a renewed appetite for thoughtful, long-form essay writing and short fiction. People tire of clickbait and the roller-coaster of hot takes. We offer something different: writing that is longer in the making, that goes through an involved and careful editorial process. We don't foresee the 'death' of print, although our online platform is wonderful for reaching a wide audience. A printed issue of the White Review offers a different kind of reading experience, away from the screen. The design suggests a specific pace, a different kind of attention. It's also a beautiful, tactile object.”