Diverse December

#diversedecember was launched on Twitter on the 1st of December to celebrate BAME, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, authors, and to highlight the continuing lack of diversity in publishing.

I have blogged about the lack of diversity in children's literature here many times over the past few years. I've also blogged about Malorie Blackman and Bali Rai's call for more diversity in children's literature, and about how the lack of diversity in children's literature affected me when I was growing up.

Now, Nikesh Shukla has joined Jon McGregor in an attack slamming the elitism of an industry which “work[s] to perpetuate an environment in which their own sort feel at home."

The article was published in the Guardian: 'Where are the Brown People?: Authors slam lack of diversity in UK publishing'.

On Twitter people have been sharing what they want to read this month and recommending books. It's easier to do this with contemporary fiction because there seem to be far fewer published books by BAME teen writers.

I'll be reading these two great new books published this year by BAME teen/YA authors:

The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo by Catherine Johnson

13 Hours by Narinder Dhami

I'll also be reading these adult fiction books:

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

The Private Life of Mrs Sharma by Ratika Kapur

A Restless Wind by Sharukh Husain

Nosy Crow has announced that they would like to support #diversedecember. So if there are any BAME authors out there, now is your chance to submit. Check out the submission guidelines first here - Nosy Crow

Tom from Nosy Crow said, "Today we’re announcing an open call for children’s fiction submissions from debut BAME writers. I think that it’s incredibly important that our industry represents a wide range of voices, not only so that children from every background can recognise their own lives and experiences in the books that they read, but also simply to enrich the body of children’s literature that we publish, by moving out of a monoculture and embracing a wider world of ideas."

Nikesh Shukla is also compiling an anthology of essays by BAME authors, The Good Immigrant, fifteen writers who will be exploring what it means to be Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic in the UK today. He is looking for funding - here's the link if you'd like to pledge - UNBOUND

J K Rowling has just pledged £5K.

You can follow #diversedecember on Twitter for more book recommendations and news.

Please leave your book recommendations in the comments.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks Savita Kalhan

Last week was the 8^th anniversary of Teen Librarian Monthly, run by the amazing Matt Imrie, @mattlibrarian. All the Edge authors were invited to write a piece on ‘Getting Kids Reading’, which is becoming more and more important in a world bursting with social media: You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Instant Chat – the list is endless. Factor in all the other distractions of being a teenager, and it’s easy to see how reading a book begins to fall way down their list of priorities.

My piece for Teen Librarian Monthly was about diversity in children’s literature. I’m cross-posting it here because it’s important to highlight the problem as many times as possible.

I recently blogged the lack of diversity in children’s books - Black and White and Everything in Between: You can read it here.

It was one of very many blogs on the subject – on both sides of the Atlantic. The subject seems to be gathering momentum – particularly in the States.

Following BookExpo America’s (BEA) BookCon line up of an all-white-all-male panel of ‘luminaries from the world of children’s and TEEN/YA writers’, an online campaign was conducted with the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks.

Here’s the link to their Facebook page.
And this link is to their Tumblr page

#WeNeedDiverseBooks ran a three day event. Most of it was online on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, but from the photos on Tumblr you can see that librarians were very much involved – as were readers, who took photos of themselves saying why they felt the need for more diversity in books

The American Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) also initiated a programme to address the lack of diversity in libraries in the States. The letter, below, was posted by Alyson Felman-Piltch, a librarian at Indiana University:
Dear Colleagues:
Many of you have already read ALSC’s White Paper entitled “The Importance of Diversity in Library Programs and Materials for Children” (available here). If not, I highly urge you to read it, as well as participate in the “We Need Diverse Books” social media campaign.
In lieu of all the recent hubbub around these important measures, I wanted to re-advertise and advocate for participation in an important effort currently being undertaken by members of the EMIERT (Ethnic & Multicultural Exchange Round Table). I am currently the Chair for the Task Force on Establishing Guidelines for Selecting Multicultural Materials for School & Public Libraries, and we would love to have additional voices and advocates on our task force. This is a virtual committee, though we will be trying to get together at Conferences, such as ALA Annual, ALSC Institute, and the YALSA Lit Symposium. If you would like more information on the Task Force, or are interested in joining, please do not hesitate to contact me by replying to this email. Please feel free to proliferate and share this email amongst groups and listservs.All the best,AlysonAlyson Feldman-Piltch, MLS/MIS CandidateDepartment of Library and Infoalyf
In the UK, the Guardian also followed the debate as authors added their voices to the call for more diversity. You can read it here here. 

As a direct result of the campaign, BEA decided there was a need for a panel discussing diversity in children’s literature and consequently invited authors and librarians to a special event at the Convention.

What’s very clear is a call for more diversity in children’s literature, from picture books to books for young adults, diversity in not only colour and race but in everything. In  Malorie Blackman’s words, “diversity in literature fosters knowledge and understanding of others outside our own sphere of experience. It is only through knowledge and empathy of how others live that we can attempt to communicate and connect with each other.”

Setting aside the other factors that might contribute to teens generally reading less, are teens partly reading less because there isn’t enough diversity in the books available to them? And does it start when they are much younger, when they are frustrated by not finding a voice they can identify with or a character to relate to?


Savita Kalhan website

Twitter @savitakalhan

Being Gay in Teen and YA fiction -- Savita Kalhan

Over the last few weeks I keep coming across the story of the two American writers, Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manja Brown, who were asked by their agent to either remove gay characters from their YA books or to ‘straighten’ them. The story first appeared on the Publishers Weekly Genreville blog, but the authors, although happy to discuss what they were told to do by the agent, refused to name them. The name of the agent ultimately came to light, but they subsequently refuted the story put forward by the two authors.

There seems to be several sides to this story. Was it a case of two over-sensitive writers being unwilling to change/rewrite a book that wasn’t up to scratch? Or was it the agency who felt that gay characters in YA just don’t sell books? From a publishers point of view, a book with gay central characters is going to have a very limited market compared to one with heterosexual characters. From their perspective, that’s not homophobia, that’s just a question of numbers.

The whole issue is still out there. Soon enough, discussions about what really went on, or might have gone on, or what it was all really about hit Twitter with: #YesGayYA. Many of the commentators felt that the real issue here was the censorship practised by the gate-keepers. We’re talking about the States here, not the UK.

As far as I can tell, and from personal experience, gate-keepers here are very much kept in mind when teen books are published in the UK. The reason why I had to remove a few ‘hells’ and other minor expletives from my book, which is aimed at teens, was because it was felt that librarians wouldn’t approve. I don’t think the same is necessarily true of YA fiction with a slightly older readership. 

In Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry, the younger brother of the central character is both black and gay. Malorie has said that she has had a positive response to this.

Have other writers had a similar experience to Malorie, or have there been problems? And is the divide between what’s deemed acceptable in teen lit and in YA lit becoming wider?

Or is it that better-known writers are afforded more latitude??