Britain's black avant-garde fiction writers have disappeared

Get Nadine White's Race Report newsletter for a fresh perspective on the week's news Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. This did not become fully apparent to me until I encountered black writers like the Harlem Renaissance aesthete and eccentric Richard Bruce Nugent, who painted ornate multicoloured phalli on his walls and partied at EM Forster’s country house; who cultivated the frivolous and experimental, showing me that baroque, marginal, queer prose did not belong to elite white novelists, nor did a love of it approach anything like assimilation. In a 2015 article, author Courttia Newland pointed to the results of another report: “Of the 203 published novelists based in the UK who took part in an online survey, 30 per cent came from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background, and 47 per cent said their debut was agented, compared with 64 per cent of the white novelists. “Once published, 53 per cent of Bame authors remained without an agent, compared with 37 per cent of white authors.” Black writers are also less likely to be reviewed or republished. Novelist Isabel Waidner recently asked why “are most contemporary, politically acute avant-garde writers coming through poetry, performance, art, film, you name it, and not prose literature?” This is particularly true of black writers.