Men Aren’t Vanishing From Fiction, But Misconceptions Persist

Published: 25 November 2025. The English Chronicle Desk. The English Chronicle Online

Tobi Coventry is invisible, yet he is here. A debut novelist writing about sexuality, desire, and, inadvertently, masculinity, Coventry represents the kind of male author some critics claim no longer exists. For the past five years, the narrative has circulated that men cannot win major literary prizes or write compelling fiction about young men. Coventry spends his days reading professionally, scouting books before they surface, and digging through backlists for stories ripe for adaptation. So, when he read The Guardian’s take on the Booker Prize—literary fiction “closed to men,” books about young men “hard to find,” David Szalay’s win reintroducing “masculinity” to literature—he was baffled.

“Some of the best new books come from men and some from women, and I’ve never thought, ‘I’m really waiting for a book from a man,’” Coventry says from his home office in Rye, lined with shelves stacked with authors of all genders. Then he lists the supposedly extinct male voices: prolific Ben Myers with Male Tears, Douglas Stuart, Michael McGee, Paul Mendez, Tony Tulathimutte, Djamel White. Coventry notes that women also explore young men and masculinity, citing writers like Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, whose work The Guardian simultaneously acknowledges and marginalizes, attributing its significance to “female interiority.”

Coventry’s debut, He’s the Devil, darkly comic and indebted to Stephen King, Moshfegh, and Eliza Clark, will be published next year. Its protagonist is a lonely man in his late twenties, drawn into the unsettling presence of a new flatmate. Coventry explains that genre fiction allows examinations of masculinity to flourish under the radar, hidden in tropes and shadows. The supposed “crisis” of male fiction ignores the men thriving, sometimes dominating, in genre spaces. “The issue here is partly talking about one specific type of book that might win prizes. That can be dangerous because people look for a direct comparison,” he adds.

Novelist Eliza Clark agrees, noting that the brightest young male novelists today are queer, men of colour, or both. “That’s great: it represents a true diversifying of the industry, though obviously there’s more work to do.” Clark distinguishes these writers from the old guard—figures like Will Self and Bret Easton Ellis—who, she implies, are no longer representative of contemporary literary culture.

The media has repeatedly asked where male writers have gone since 2020. James Marriott wrote in The Times that “hotshot” young male novelists had disappeared, citing four men on a 13-strong Booker longlist. Social media spikes and sympathetic essays, such as Barry Pierce’s in Dazed, often amplify this narrative. Pierce questioned how society could understand young men if chroniclers of their lives were supposedly absent. “How will people see the role of young men in British society in 2022 if first-hand sources do not exist?” he asked.

This year, Conduit Books emerged, founded by Jude Cook, intending to publish men exclusively as a corrective to their perceived marginalization. Szalay’s Booker win reignited debates, with commentators emphasizing the importance of a man writing about a man’s inner life. Yet historical context undermines this urgency: since the Booker’s inception in 1969, 36 men have won compared to 18 women. Over the past decade, the ratio is seven to four. Literary prizes broadly show a balanced gender distribution, while debut lists consistently feature male authors alongside women. The perception of disappearance appears more a recurrent media mirage than a reality.

The nostalgic yearning often expressed in these debates privileges a specific type of male author: white, confident, edgy, a renegade reminiscent of Amis, Roth, Franzen, Ellis, or Hemingway. Clark frames it succinctly: “Why haven’t I seen an enfant terrible smash hit novel from a 29-year-old white guy from Oxford in a long time?” The longing is not for male writers per se, but for a very particular archetype, historically celebrated and now less dominant.

Martin Chilton, chief books critic at The Independent, notes that literature is diversifying. “Perhaps a masterpiece about a present-day incel is being written now,” he says, wryly. He recalls the 1990s “lad lit” boom, with publishers investing in novels like Booty Nomad and Bendy Girl. Those works, he implies, did little to cement a lasting cultural legacy.

For those insisting on “cool” books by “young” men, contemporary authors already fulfill this role. Gabriel Krauze’s Who They Was, a Booker-longlisted autofiction of violence and survival, and Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, exploring love, sex, writing, and disillusionment, exemplify how modern male voices navigate literary landscapes. Both were marketed effectively, demonstrating that opportunities exist for male authors when publishing and media industries support them.

Gender shapes literary reception and marketing. Clark points out a persistent disparity: female authors are often expected to be visually presentable and clickable, while men’s debuts are treated more straightforwardly as literature. Women’s work is often grouped by perceived similarity, such as being “for fans of Sally Rooney,” whereas male writers’ books are compared to canonical literary figures. This reinforces the perception of scarcity, skewed by marketing rather than talent.

Another overlooked dimension is male readership. Molly Flatt, author and opinion editor at The Bookseller, cites research from The Women’s Trust: women purchase 80 per cent of all novels. Men overwhelmingly avoid books written by women, while women do not reciprocate this bias. “If the argument is that we need more books by men because male readers supposedly empathize more with male authors, women don’t seem to have that problem,” Flatt observes.

The claim that 80 per cent of fiction-commissioning editors are women is often cited as a reason for male marginalization, but Flatt dismisses it. She argues that the industry’s gender imbalance is secondary to societal issues. Encouraging men to read more, particularly through adolescence, is the real challenge. The wider problem is capturing attention, moving boys and men from screens back into narratives. Misdiagnosing a societal literacy issue as a publishing problem risks misunderstanding the real barrier to male literary engagement.

In essence, the debate around men “vanishing” from fiction conflates visibility with diversity, nostalgia with reality, and marketing with literary absence. Men continue to write compelling fiction, and the landscape is evolving to include voices historically marginalized, while simultaneously offering opportunities for male authors across genres. Coventry, Clark, Krauze, Conroe, and others demonstrate that masculinity in literature is neither extinct nor irrelevant; it is simply expressed differently, in response to a shifting cultural, social, and media landscape.