Perhaps all of this is why it feels so personal and significant when the things men thought they could count on start to dissolve, such as the hope that they could, if they wanted to, publish a bestselling work of literary fiction. For the past five to 10 years the fiction world has seemingly been dominated by women – Sally Rooney, Dolly Alderton, etc – in sharp contrast to the Martin Amis-Ian McEwan-William Boyd era of the late 20th century. Many column inches have been taken up analysing why this is, and why it’s a problem. Enter Conduit Books – the new publisher from Jude Cook, a critic, author and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster – that will initially publish books only by men (he’s open to women writers in the future, he says) and provide a platform for “unheard narratives”.
Martin Amis in 2014 (Photo by Johnny Louis/FilmMagic)
The concurrence of male crisis and success for female authors is not a coincidence: they are indirect and direct results of increased equality for women. You can see why not being able to write novels is easily tacked on to the long list of things going wrong for men in 2025. But it is counterproductive to conflate the two issues to this extent.
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The effect of this conflation is that people start to hold a subconscious belief that men’s alienation is a direct result of women’s success. The reality is more complex, or perhaps more simple: the work of platforming and creating equal opportunities for women, and ensuring men are fulfilled and confident enough not to become incels, is the same. I believe Cook when he says it “can’t be over-stressed” that Conduit Books “doesn’t seek an adversarial stance” – but I struggle to see how boiling it down to the gender issue helps.
What’s more, 80 per cent of novels are bought by women; reading fiction is always something women have done more than men (a pastime that has, as a result, historically been written off as sentimental and pointless). Yet it’s only now that the number of respected female authors is proportionately increasing: it was after the 1991 Booker shortlist contained no female writers that the Women’s Prize for Fiction was founded, giving a platform for the authors who were going unrecognised by an industry whose executives were primarily male.
Conduit’s founder has cited the Netflix show Adolescence as evidence of why men’s representation matters (Photo: Netflix)“It is just to address a very small imbalance in the negligible world of literary fiction,” Cook said of his new venture. “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.”
Well, with the last sentence I couldn’t agree more. But to drown out all that noise, I have another idea: young men could always take a punt and read one of the many books available that has been written by a woman.
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