I took some time after the London Book Fair to reflect on the current affairs of the publishing landscape. AI, reading crises and audiobooks were the headlining events, but alongside these were panels on topics that are surprisingly as pressing as they were decades ago. Still we are facing a lack of attention on women’s fiction, dominance by males in big league titles and prizes, and a half-baked focus on publishing authors from minority groups. It’s disappointing to reckon with the fact that today, women’s art and women’s voices are still rejected by men in every space.

I attended one of these panels: ‘Her Voice: tackling the gender gap in non-fiction publishing’. The panel featured four established women of publishing on the panel, each speaking to the necessary promotion of women’s writing as its own category.

Claire Shanahan is the founder of the Women’s Prize Trust and chaired the panel. Together with Roma Agrawal (engineer and author), Maria Whelan (agent at Mushens Entertainment) and Kirty Topiwala (executive publisher of non-fiction at Hodder & Stoughton), they introduced the audience to the realities of non-fiction publishing with the bleak statement: men don’t read women-written books. 

Image 1: ‘Her Voice: tackling the gender gap in non-fiction publishing’ at London Book Fair 2026 day one (Dingwall 2026)

Among the topics discussed were the ridiculous complaints faced by Roma over her book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way because she discussed the ingenuity of the breast pump for an entire chapter. Complaints entirely, unsurprisingly, by men. It seems that female fiction is written off, brushed off the shoulder, trapped in a box of romance and fantasy, or otherwise left alone by men. But women’s non-fiction is still too much to ask men to read (The Guardian 2023).

This is not new. We’ve had George Eliot and the Brontë/Bell brothers, A.M. Barnard and women of all eras publishing under male pseudonyms to entice larger reading groups. When an attendee asked the panel if it were a good idea to publish her work under a male name as her publisher advised, I felt an anger older than time. Kirty rebutted but did not have more to say besides a stern yet sympathetic ‘don’t do that.’

Expanding women’s non-fiction readerships feels almost impossible. That is why we still see women using initials when publishing in certain fields. Sarah J. Mass is fine, because men don’t even take a sniff into those books, but R.F. Kuang must take caution because she’s delving into the ‘male’ world of science-fiction, and so a gender-neutral author name will help her get further.

The publishing industry is women-dominant, one of the most prominent industries that has, as of 2024, 68% of its workforce made up by females (Joynson 2024). The problem that follows is an odd ironic destiny where the work done by women, (not even necessarily) about women, seems only to be for women. Work written by men, but brought up, edited, designed, typeset, marketed and produced by women, is for everyone!

All we can do is incentivise wider readership as a whole by categorising women’s non-fiction and bolstering it through organisations like the Women’s Prize Trust. Beyond that, we must have hope that little wins will translate into big ones, and that one day biases and expectations of what is considered good literature (and who gets to write it) will be eradicated.

—

Claire Shanahan is the founder of the Women’s Prize Trust, an excellent foundation devoted to showcasing the very best of women’s writing. More information can be found on the trust’s website: https://womensprize.com/

Roma Agrawal’s book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way was published with the help of Kirty Topiwala at Hodder & Stoughton, and is available to purchase here: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nuts-and-bolts-how-tiny-inventions-make-our-world-work-roma-agrawal

You can submit your work to Maria Whelan on the Mushens Entertainment website here: https://www.mushens-entertainment.com/maria-whelan

References and word count

Word count: 550

Bibliography

The Guardian 2023. ‘The Guardian view on nonfiction by women: so much buried treasure’, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/18/the-guardian-view-on-nonfiction-by-women-so-much-buried-treasure (accessed 20 April 2026).

Joynson, J. 2024. ‘2024 workforce report published’ Publishers Association, available at: https://www.publishers.org.uk/2024-workforce-report-published/ (accessed 15 April 2026).

Shanahan, C., Agrawal, R., Topiwala, K. and Whelan, M. 2026. ‘Her Voice: tackling the gender gap in non-fiction publishing’ London Book Fair 2026.

Images used

Cover image: Agrawal, R. 2024. Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way Hodder & Stoughton: London, available at: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nuts-and-bolts-how-tiny-inventions-make-our-world-work-roma-agrawal (accessed 22 April 2026)

Image 1: Dingwall, C. 2026. ‘Her Voice: tackling the gender gap in non-fiction publishing’ at London Book Fair 2026 day one [photograph].