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We know that if children feel invited into the world of books, when they recognise elements of themselves in the pages, they are more likely to form a love of reading. – Marcus Satha
Tracking who is speaking for whom
Tracking whether characters in books are ‘own voice’ (where the authors or illustrators share the marginalised identity of the main characters) is not easy. But without it, the publishing industry’s solutions for under-representation would probably be very superficial, according to a new report.
THE Excluded Voices report, carried out by Inclusive Books for Children (IBC) – investigates whether minoritised ethnic, neurodivergent and disabled main characters in books are represented by ‘own voice’ creators with lived experience. It found British ‘own-voice’ creators versus international and ‘non-own voice’ creators remains a close-fought battle in toddler, picture-book and children’s fiction. It also found a significant drop in British own voice black characters.
Sarah Satha, co-founder of Inclusive Books for Children, said: “Why do these findings matter so much? For one, we face a reading for pleasure crisis, and the narrow range of books hogging shelves is clearly not doing a good job of enticing a wider range of potential booklovers. It’s also not enough to plug the gap with non-Own Voice stories. This type of representation is superficial, and the reader can sense it. More than half of main characters with marginalised identities were created by author- illustrator teams with no lived experience of said identity, and that’s really concerning.”
Big picture
Finding a clear sector view is not straightforward. The big picture figures – before looking at specific groups and the voices representing them – found that 2,721 books were published in the area of analysis: toddler, picture book and children’s fiction in 2024.
Of these 2,721 books only 161, or 5.9 per cent, featured marginalised main characters. This is very low compared to the proportion of the population in these groups. Just looking at the proportion of school children from minoritised ethnic groups shows it would need to be around 30.7 per cent to be representative – but potentially significantly higher
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considering this figure doesn’t take neurodivergent or disabled pupils into consideration. But despite this low level, the bigger picture is actually improving slightly, compared to previous years. That’s because, while the overall number of books published in 2023 and 2024 were very similar (2,719 and 2,721 respectively), the proportion of them that feature marginalised main characters has increased significantly – going up from 149 in 2023 to 161 in 2024, an 8.1 per cent increase.
Devil in the detail
Unfortunately, that’s where most of the good news ends. As a study of ‘own voice’ representation the
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