Charts BAME Writers BAME author focus


final) BAME author in the top 300. His Black Box Thinking has shiſted 57,192 copies this year to place 169th.


Clockwise from top left Kazuo Ishiguro, Andrea Levy and Dorothy Koomson


Three UK BAME authors in the top 300, and six in the


top 500, remarkably makes it something of a stellar year in diversity terms


The fact that there are three UK BAME authors in the top 300, and six in the top 500, remarkably makes it something of a stellar year in diversit terms. In 2015, the bestselling BAME-authored title was The Art of Eating Well by Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley (whose mother is a Filipina) in 195th place (77,775 copies sold). The next best, and the bestselling BAME novel, was Laline Paull’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction-shortlisted The Bees, in 315th. In 2014, the top BAME- authored title was Yotam Oto- lenghi’s Plent More (in 221st), with Koomson’s The Flavours of Love the highest-ranking fiction title, in 606th.


British BAME-authored books (2016) pos title 1 59 The Buried Giant


2 156 That Girl from Nowhere 3 169 Black Box Thinking 4 304 Good + Simple


5 364 The Year of the Runaways 6 411 Sirocco


author imprint Kazuo Ishiguro


Dorothy Koomson Matthew Syed J & M Hemsley Sunjeev Sahota Sabrina Ghayour


7 524 The Unexpected... Inspector Chopra Vaseem Khan 8 560 Nadiya’s Kitchen 9 656 Persiana


10 663 The Art of Eating Well


Nadiya Hussain Sabrina Ghayour J & M Hemsley


isbn (978+)


Faber & Faber Arrow


John Murray Ebury


Picador Michael Joseph sales


0571315079 100,997 0099598831 60,628 1473613805 57,192 1785031601 40,275 1447241652 35,204


Mitchell Beazley 1784720476 32,501 Mulholland


Mitchell Beazley 1845339104 21,899 Ebury


0091958329 21,776 British BAME-authored books (all-time) pos title


1 99 Small Island 2 101 White Teeth 3 127 Brick Lane


4 169 My Best Friend's Girl 5 353 On Beauty


6 454 The Reluctant Fundamentalist 7 624 Home Cooking Made Easy 8 633 Never Let Me Go


9 694 When We Were Orphans 10 735 Noughts and Crosses


author


Andrea Levy Zadie Smith Monica Ali


Dorothy Koomson Zadie Smith


Mohsin Hamid Lorraine Pascale Kazuo Ishiguro Kazuo Ishiguro


Malorie Blackman imprint


Headline Penguin


Black Swan Time Warner Penguin Penguin


HarperCollins Faber & Faber Faber & Faber Corgi Children’s


% of equivalent title tcm total 751,370 749,781 676,167 588,129 409,655 362,706 307,870 306,246 290,053 279,991


1473612280 26,881 0718184513 25,085


Of the top 500 titles for 2016, 343 were writen by UK authors, of which 1.7% were penned by BAME Brits. That drops to 1.2% when extrapo- lated to the top 500. Consid- ering the BAME popula- tion of England and Wales is around 15%, this is shockingly low. The US has 30 Ameri- can BAME-authored titles in its top 500 (and 19 in the top 300), equivalent to 6% of the list. An improvement on the UK, granted, but less impressive considering the BAME commu- nit across the pond is some 27% of its total.


Prize writers Both BAME charts on this page are topped by major UK prize- winners: Ishiguro has won the Booker; Andrea Levy the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It suggests prizes play a key role in boosting sales of books by people of colour, and in that sense the Booker formbook is encouraging. Three of the 28 Brits who have won it are BAME authors—Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and V S Naipaul—with that rate (10.7%), far closer to the UK demographic than the bestseller lists. Nielsen’s all-time top 10 is dominated by Dan Brown, E L James and J K Rowling, but the BAME all-time list is, mostly, literary. Ishig- uro and Zadie Smith are almost neck and neck in sales terms: Smith prevails by volume


(by around 9,000 units), but Ishiguro has pocketed some £250,000 more than Smith. ×


Data is from Nielsen BookScan; the POS field relates to its position in the overall chart, covering titles written by


authors of all ethnicities. For instance, Small Island is the top-selling title by a BAME author and the 99th-bestselling title by any author. The % of equivalent title field posits the book’s sales as a percentage of that in the equivalent position of the overall chart; e.g. Small Island’s sales are 15.9% that of Fifty Shades of Grey, the all-time number one.


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Photography: Jeff Cottenden


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