![\"The](\"\/pictures\/wissewords\/unbearable-whiteness-of-literature.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nThe BBC is doing another of its tedious “reading is cool and hip and you should read more too or at least watch our programmes about books” promotions. In the process The Culture Show<\/cite> also chose its top twelve new writers and, well, there’s something off about them. It’s not just the facepalmingly awfulness of how the chair of the jury describes what literary fiction is<\/a> in The Guardian<\/cite>:\n<\/p>\n \nWhat is literary fiction? It is not genre fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historical novel. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, the leading British prize for science fiction. Yet you only have to think about these two examples to see how they escape their genres. Mantel’s novel revisits the favourite stamping ground of historical fiction \u2013 Henry VIII and his wives \u2013 in order to rethink what it might be to see events filtered through the consciousness of a person from a distant age. Ishiguro takes a dystopian hypothesis \u2013 human clones being bred for their organs \u2013 and then declines to put in place any of the sci-fi framework that would allow us to understand how this could be. Indeed, the whole interest of his story is in the limits placed upon its narrator. These are both “literary” novels because they ask us to attend to the manner of their telling. And, despite their narrative demands, they have both found hundreds of thousands of readers willing to do so.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \nBut well, doesn’t that group of up and coming literary fiction writers look a bit white to you? Granted, they all look awfully middle class as well, but BBC and Guardian<\/cite>, so let it go. Is the state of literature in Britain so bad that no promising writer of colour could be found?\n<\/p>\n