Canelo / Arts Council England

part of the UK doesn’t bode well for quality of life as a writer. Still, 
there are positive indications that literature is starting to build networks 
outside the M25 – the flourishing of independent publishers from Galley 
Beggar in Norwich to Bluemoose Books in Hebden Bridge, the launch of 
the Northern Fiction Alliance, and the existence of writer development 
agencies such as New Writing North in Newcastle, Writing West 
Midlands in Birmingham and Writers’ Centre Norwich are all evidence 
of a centrifugal force in literary writing. Yet those do not in themselves 
imply widespread support for literary writing outside the capital. 
One way of looking at this is through the prism of insider networks. 
Virtually no one is suggesting that the literary world is consciously racist, 
or even class-biased. More likely is that people work through available 
networks and such networks, wherever they are, tend to cluster around 
similar backgrounds. This means that membership of the literary insider 

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Canelo / Arts Council England | 
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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
network, centred as it is amongst London-based, white and middle 
class constituents, favours those already on the inside. This isn’t an 
insuperable barrier – but it’s inarguably a barrier that must be overcome. 
Opening up the insider networks of writers, agents, publishers, 
reviewers and commentators around literary fiction is, then, one of the 
key challenges in opening it up generally. 
It would be wrong to say that writing is a closed shop. Agents in 
particular were keen to stress their openness to submissions and 
a number of young editors talked about their willingness to bypass 
traditional channels to find new voices. It would equally be wrong, 
however, to say that the literary marketplace is equally accessible to all; 
having the right connections still matters greatly, and these are to some 
extent still governed by questions of race, class, gender and location.
Recap
Returning to some of the assumptions covered in this report (the rest 
will be explored below), what can we see?: 
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