Men-only publisher hopes to fix ‘imbalance’ in world of books
Cold River - out of print hard cover book ๐ looking for new home (2005 -2025)The “marginalisation” of male writers has prompted the launch of the first men-only publishing house, which its founder hopes will provide a platform for “unheard narratives”.
Jude Cook said that women dominated the literary world, from agents and publishers to the display counters in Waterstones.
Cook said that the male authors who were visible tended to have been first published decades ago, citing the likes of Ian McEwan and William Boyd.
“All great writers but not new,” Cook said. “There is this assumption that all men are doing fine and have connections and money. But if you are a 21-year-old working-class male writer from Newcastle, you will feel that the system is against you.”
Cook, whose new press is called Conduit Books, said thatit was not an adversarial stance, adding that there had been “3,000 years of patriarchal domination”.
“It is just to address a very small imbalance in the negligible world of literary fiction. If there is anything political in this, it is about all the recent noise about toxic masculinity post-Trump’s second election victory, Andrew Tate and the Netflix series Adolescence.
“The subject of what young men read and write has become very important.”
Conduit Books aims to publish three outstanding novels, short story collections or memoirs a year and is seeking a launch book, which it would prefer to be a debut by a male British novelist under 35.
Cook said that he had thought a column in The Times by James Marriott five years ago, bemoaning the death of the “young male novelist”, would have been a call to arms for the publishing industry.
However, he said that today the “landscape is still much the same”.
He said: “Publishing is overwhelmingly female-dominated and it is understandable they want stories that resonate with them.
“Given how difficult it is to make money with literary fiction then if a book about fatherhood does not resonate with them they can’t in all consciousness take it on.
“So we thought what if, in a modest way, we did a press that made a space for male authors. They might have things to offer in terms of narratives that are getting overlooked: fathers and sons; the working-class male experience; love and relationships from the male point of view.”
By one criterion — Booker prize nominations — men do not appear to be marginalised. In 2023, there were more Pauls on the shortlist than there were women — although last year there were five women and only one man on the shortlist.
Cook, who is also a literary critic, author and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster, said that he had been surprised by the lack of commentary after The Bookseller’s top ten fiction picks for April were all by women.
The next month’s list contained just two men, one of whom was Irvine Welsh, whose first book was published 32 years ago.
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Cook said that Conduit Books was open to publishing fiction by women in the future but the emphasis to begin with would be on male authors.
He said that he thought there was “ambitious, funny, political and cerebral fiction by men” that was being passed by.
