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New comedy The Green Room to explore obstacles for black writers

The publishing industry’s lack of diversity is to be the focus of a new comic play by award-winning writers Yvvette Edwards and Irenosen Okojie, who want it to be a “subtle and pertinent” reminder of the challenges black writers face.

The Green Room will be directed by the Manchester Royal Exchange’s joint artistic director Roy Alexander Weise and produced by Alex Wheatle, who said the play is a “reminder for publishers and writers of all backgrounds of what black creatives have to navigate in their chosen careers.”

The play will be livestreamed from Theatre Peckham on 4 July, and focuses on six authors who are backstage before a diversity in literature award they have all been nominated for.

Described as “a timely and clear-eyed exploration of the publishing industry”, and the obstacles that writers of colour in the UK face while trying to carve out a career, all proceeds will go to Theatre Peckham as it fundraises to counter the costs of the pandemic.

Wheatle, whose own early life was detailed as part of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, said the play follows academic research including work by UCL’s Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, who has produced reports on publishing’s diversity figures.

In 2018, Bold found that the number of young adult books published by authors of colour had declined since 2010 and warned that the UK’s “outdated” publishing sector needed to change quickly in order to address the imbalance.

The play also comes just before the first anniversary of Rethinking “Diversity” in Publishing, the first in-depth diversity study on UK trade fiction and publishing, which found that publishers see writers of colour as a “commercial risk”.

The study found that because the core audience for publishers is white and middle-class, the entire industry is “essentially set up to cater for this one audience” and that publishers were reluctant to take on diverse talent because of a perceived “lack of quality”.

Edwards said the play’s comedy mirrors the dark humour black authors use to protect themselves “against the trauma of having to constantly relive all the mechanisms that obstruct our access to fair and equal inclusion and progress” in real life.

She added that black authors were still being invited to literary festivals to discuss the issue of diversity instead of promoting their own work, “as if the resolution rested with them and not with the industry itself”.

Okojie added: “We chose comedy to tell the story because we want to impact people in ways that are subtle and pertinent, while leaving them with something to think about.”

The cast has still to be announced for the staged reading.