U.K. Press Accepts 'Year of Publishing Women' Challenge

Shelf Awareness

And Other Stories Publishing "will produce no books by men in 2018 in answer to Kamila Shamsie's recent call for direct action to beat gender bias in publishing," the Guardian reported.

"I would argue that it is time for everyone, male and female, to sign up to a concerted campaign to redress the inequality," Shamsie wrote last week, adding: "Why not have a year of publishing women: 2018, the centenary of women over the age of 30 getting the vote in the U.K., seems appropriate."

A small literary press that uses a network of readers to source its titles, And Other Stories is the first publisher to accept the challenge. "We've realized for a while that we've published more men than women," said publisher Stefan Tobler. "This year we've done seven books by men and four by women.... We have a wide range of people helping us with our choices, and our editors are women.... and yet somehow we still publish more books by men than women."

Senior editor Sophie Lewis added that her primary focus over the course of the year is "to examine the selection and promotion process, the production of their books from commissioning to reader's bedside.... By taking on the challenge we will expose our systems and the paths of recommendation and investigation that brings books to us, and we will end up becoming a kind of small-scale model for a much bigger inquiry about why women's writing is consistently sidelined or secondary, the poor cousin rather than the equal of men's writing."