Pulitzer-prize winning author's comments that 'the default position of reading and writing ... was white, straight and male' are backed by writers including Aminatta Forna and Daljit Nagra
Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Pulitzer prize winner Junot Díaz's blistering attack on the "unbearable too-whiteness" of creative writing courses in the US has been echoed by experts in the UK, with author and professor Aminatta Forna pointing to a "backlash" as the "centre in literature begins to shift away from the Anglo-American writer towards writers with different backgrounds".
The award-winning poet Daljit Nagra, meanwhile, has issued a similarly damning indictment of British poetry, saying that "too often editors use a euphemism such as 'taste' as an excuse for rejecting black authors because they actually mean 'I am not interested in minority writing'", and that "when 'race' is written about by black or Asian poets it is too often dismissed as something that has been 'done before', a criticism which is not generally targeted at those writing about 'love' or 'snow'".
"I believe this to be the case because unoriginal and cliched white poetry finds publishers with dreadful ease whilst unconventional black writing does not," Nagra told the Guardian.
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The award-winning poet Daljit Nagra, meanwhile, has issued a similarly damning indictment of British poetry, saying that "too often editors use a euphemism such as 'taste' as an excuse for rejecting black authors because they actually mean 'I am not interested in minority writing'", and that "when 'race' is written about by black or Asian poets it is too often dismissed as something that has been 'done before', a criticism which is not generally targeted at those writing about 'love' or 'snow'".
"I believe this to be the case because unoriginal and cliched white poetry finds publishers with dreadful ease whilst unconventional black writing does not," Nagra told the Guardian.
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