Info?

It won a Booker, sounds like it was taken pretty seriously to me.

There’s an irony to social politics entering the art world and then corroding the one industry that should be democratic for everyone. I was gutted to hear this happen. At this rate. Any adventure novel that takes place in an exotic location ever will be cancelled.

There's two broad trends that this reflects: namely that audiences for fiction have become much more female and much more diverse over time, and the publishing industry itself has at least become more female in its workforce composition.

Go into any bookstore and I'll almost guarantee you'll find 75%+ of its clientele are women. Look up the NYT best sellers and it's always full of romance and summer reads with covers that ostensibly look to appeal to women.

It's not clear to me whether this shift is supply-driven (i.e., publishing houses are now majority women, and they're deciding to push more novels that appeal to them) or demand-driven (i.e., men aren't buying books about men as much anymore so publishing houses respond by shifting their demographic focus). It's probably the latter but perhaps a mix of both.

Same goes for the push toward diversity. There is something of a norm that has developed in liberal and progressive circles that the only people that should be able to tell stories about non-white persons are non-white people. Publishers probably want to avoid the American Dirt-type backlash. I don't take issue with this in principle but it does make you wonder if some amazing work has been passed up simply because of the color of the author's skin... Which seems to run against the notion of pluralism in the first place.