Episode 1: Saying hello, background, context
The Quine Report begins!
Hi everyone! Welcome to the Quine Report newsletter, which brings you the Quine Report on inequalities in the Scottish literary sector in twice-weekly episodes. This first letter talks about the context for this report.
Firstly, though: hello, thank you for reading!
My name is Christina Neuwirth, and I’m an Edinburgh-based researcher, author and bookseller. The Quine Report is based on my PhD, which I conducted from 2017-2023 across several institutions, including the University of Stirling, the University of Glasgow, and Scottish Book Trust. My research was funded by a Creative Economies Studentship from the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I’m currently halfway through re-reading Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed. Today while on a walk by the river I started listening to Lucy Dacus’s new album and it’s so beautiful. But enough about me!
I think it’s really important to set the scene for the Quine Report. I started my PhD in 2017 and that’s when most of my counting data starts too, so I want to take this opportunity to quickly remind us (1) what was happening around 2017 with women’s writing in Scotland, and (2) some of the things that have happened since then (more broadly with gender equality in literature). All these ideas form the landscape in which the Quine Report is embedded.
Some background & context
Among Scotland’s long literary heritage there are many notable historical and contemporary female writers, such as Naomi Mitchison, Nan Shepherd, Jackie Kay, Margaret Elphinstone, Denise Mina and Hannah Lavery, to name just a few. Many scholars have noted that women’s voices have been pushed to the margins throughout Scottish literary history, and if you want to read more on this I highly recommend the collections I listed here1 in the footnote. Scholars have also wondered whether this historical marginalisation may now be slowly changing, e.g. look at this quote from 2022:
…in the last decade or so, […] the new Scottish canon has increasingly come to be referred to as made up of women writers such as [Janice] Galloway herself, Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Louise Welsh and A. L. Kennedy, but also as including new names which are far too numerous all to be mentioned here – Jenni Fagan, Alice Thompson or Kirstin Innes to name but a few.2
(We’ll come back to the idea of the Scottish literary canon when we get to the interview section of the report, so do remember this for later.)
At this point it’s also important to point out the contemporary context in which I was doing my research – most of the numbers in this report look in detail at 2017-2019, which was a very specific time in Scotland’s national literature, or at least how it felt: for example, in 2016 the writer Nan Shepherd’s face was put on the RBS £5 note! In 2018, Muriel Spark’s work was celebrated widely to mark what would have been her 100th birthday, and the celebrations included the renaming of some streets and the re-issuing of her fiction back catalogue! Scotland’s First Minister was a woman and she loved reading! So like Pittin-Hédon who is quoted above, I think it’s understandable why there was a feeling that maybe things weren’t so bad for women in the Scottish literary sector.
As part of my PhD, I wanted to figure out how I could possibly measure what was happening structurally with gender in the Scottish literary sector - beyond highly visible interventions, had the situation generally shifted? This report examines gender equality in numbers, across four areas of the Scottish literary sector: publishing, reviewing, book festival events, and literary prizes. Additionally, the report includes findings from interviews with decision-makers who shape Scottish literary taste and culture, including programmers, publishers, prize organisers, reviewers, and others leading literature organisations.
Inequality in literature is a major contemporary discussion. For example, in 2020 the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, started by Black fantasy author LL McKinney, collected responses on advance payments to authors and highlighted disparities between ethnicities. Other recent research has focussed on who works in publishing3 and who gets published.4 There is ample evidence from authors, publishing workers, researchers and activists to show that the literary sector isn’t equal.5 This report on gender inequality in the Scottish literary sector intersects with a wide range of challenges.
There has been renewed focus on sexual harassment catalysed through the cultural significance of the #MeToo movement.6 Beginning as a reckoning within the film industry, with survivors of sexual violence speaking out publicly against their abusers and the widespread normalisation of abuse, outcries from survivors in other industries followed. In November 2017, The Bookseller, the UK trade magazine for the publishing industry, found that over half of survey participants had been sexually harassed. (To my knowledge, no specific research has yet been done on sexual harassment in the Scottish literary sector.)
Transphobia is also an issue in the publishing industry at large. In an open letter to The Bookseller in 2021, signatories “warned [that] ‘transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry’, arguing that what is needed is ‘quiet statements of acceptance from companies and organisations within our industry’.” The letter was signed by “British publishers, writers, illustrators, and booksellers”. Trans authors in Scotland have also faced direct transphobia.
This landscape of systemic gender discrimination shapes my work, which can only consider a few aspects of how discrimination happens in literature. This report adds to this conversation clear findings on gender disparity across the Scottish literary sector, and interviews with tastemakers that consider where this disparity comes from. And we’ll get to those findings piece by piece over the next few weeks.
Next time on the Quine Report newsletter: a brief note on methodology. Next week we’ll dive into the numbers for literary prizes 1919-2024 and publishing by Scotland-based publishers 2017-2019!
Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature, ed. by Christopher Whyte (Edinburgh University Press, 1995); A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, ed. by Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh University Press, 2000); The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Cat Mitchell, ‘Access Denied: Disabled Employees and Job Seekers Reveal Their Stories’, The Bookseller, 24 September 2021.
Marie-Odile Pittin-Hédon, ‘“They Peer at My Dark Land”: The Ethics of Storytelling in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Women’s Writing’, in Scottish Writing after Devolution: Edges of the New, ed. by Marie-Odile Pittin-Hédon, Camille Manfredi, and Scott Hames (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 35–56 (p. 37).
‘Bookcareers.Com Salary Survey Results 2017’, Bookcareers [accessed 26 June 2018]; ‘Bookcareers Salary Survey 2021 - RESULTS’, Bookcareers [accessed 9 April 2024].
E.g. Danuta Kean et al, ed., ‘In Full Colour: Cultural Diversity in Publishing Today’, in Bookseller Publications (London: Bookseller Publications, 2004); Anamik Saha, ‘Diversity Initiatives Don’t Work, They Just Make Things Worse: The Ideological Function of Diversity in the Cultural Industries’, Media Diversified (blog), 16 February 2017; Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, ‘The Eight Percent Problem: Authors of Colour in the British Young Adult Market (2006–2016)’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 27 July 2018, 1–22; Alison Flood, ‘Male and Female Writers’ Media Coverage Reveals “Marked Bias”’, The Guardian, 18 March 2019; Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019); Anamik Saha and Sandra van Lente, ‘Rethinking “Diversity” in Publishing’ (London: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2020); Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, ‘The Thirteen Percent Problem: Authors of Colour in the British Young Adult Market, 2017-2019 Edition’, The International Journal of Young Adult Literature 2, no. 1 (12 November 2021): 1–35.
E.g. Ana Alacovska, ‘The Gendering Power of Genres: How Female Scandinavian Crime Fiction Writers Experience Professional Authorship’, Organization 24, no. 3 (2017): 377–96; Orian Brook, David O’Brien, and Mark Taylor, ‘Panic! It’s an Arts Emergency. Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries’ (Create London, Arts Emergency, 16 April 2018); Bernardine Evaristo, ‘Bernardine Evaristo: “These Are Unprecedented Times for Black Female Writers”’, The Guardian, 19 October 2019; Orian Brook, David O’Brien, and Mark Taylor, Culture Is Bad for You(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); ScotBPOCwriters, ‘SBWN and EDI Scotland Publish Literary Sector Survey Results’, Scottish BPOC Writers Network (blog), 26 May 2021; ScotBPOCwriters, ‘SBWN and EDI Scotland Publish Literary Sector Survey Results 2022’, Scottish BPOC Writers Network (blog), 31 October 2023; Lanre Bakare, ‘UK Publishing Less Accessible to Black Authors Now than before 2020, Industry Names Say’, The Guardian, 26 March 2025.
#MeToo is a phrase coined by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 which gained widespread visibility when the New York Times and New Yorker published an investigation into the sexual misconduct of Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. Elena Nicolaou and Courtney E. Smith, ‘A #MeToo Timeline To Show How Far We’ve Come — & How Far We Need To Go’, Refinery29, 6 October 2019.