Melanie Ramdarshan Bold: Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom
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In the past few years, UK publishing has been confronting, and confronted with, decades long inequities that have overshadowed the industry. While this is by no means a new conversation within UK publishing, or the UK creative industries more broadly, it has become clearer than ever before that barriers to access into publishing for women, people of colour, members of the LGBTQIA + community and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, remain (not to mention how intersections of such characteristics create further barriers to access). Recent industry reports and surveys have revealed the extent of the industry’s unequal representation, with one major publisher reporting a 25% gender pay gap [1], only 12.6% of people in publishing coming from working class backgrounds [2] and only 11.6% working in the industry identifying as Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (aka BAME, a favoured but problematic, as Ramdarshan Bold notes, acronym) [3].
This is the context within which Melanie...
Notes
References
- 1.Jones P, Do mind the gap. In: The Bookseller. 2018. https://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/do-mind-gap-755461 Accessed 22 Aug 2019.
- 2.Brook O et al. Panic! it’s an arts emergency: social class, taste and inequalities in the creative industries. In: Creative London. http://createlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Panic-Social-Class-Taste-and-Inequalities-in-the-Creative-Industries1.pdf Accessed 22 Aug 2019.
- 3.Publishing industry workforce diversity and inclusion survey. In: Equal Approach for The Publishers Association. 2018. https://www.publishers.org.uk/EasySiteWeb/GatewayLink.aspx?alId=26212. Accessed 22 Aug 2019.