Why African and Malagasy Stories Need More Space in British Fiction

Think of the literary novels that have been celebrated in the UK over the past decade — shortlisted for the Booker, serialised on BBC Radio 4, reviewed across the broadsheet arts pages. How many of them are set in Sub-Saharan Africa? How many feature a protagonist who is not from a Western country, or from one of the handful of African nations that have achieved a foothold in the global Anglophone imagination? Now ask a more specific question: how many are set in Madagascar?

Madagascar is home to 31 million people. It has one of the most distinctive cultures on earth — a unique convergence of African, Southeast Asian, Arab, and French colonial influences that produced a civilisation unlike anywhere else. It has a living oral literary tradition, a landscape of extraordinary biodiversity, and a diaspora spread across Europe and beyond. It has writers. It has stories.

And yet in mainstream British publishing, Madagascar is essentially invisible.

This piece is both an argument and a call to action — for readers, for publishers, and for agents. The absence of Malagasy and broader African stories from British literary fiction is not a neutral gap. It is a choice, and it has consequences.

What the Data Actually Shows

The evidence on diversity in UK publishing has been documented with uncomfortable clarity. Spread the Word's landmark reports, along with research from Rethinking Diversity in Publishing, have tracked where the pipeline breaks down. The picture is consistent: writers from underrepresented backgrounds are less likely to be signed by agents, less likely to be acquired by major publishers, less likely to receive significant marketing investment, and less likely to be reviewed in the literary press. Each stage of the process applies its own filter, and the cumulative effect is a published output that looks strikingly narrow.

Publishing has often compared itself favourably to film and music in this regard, and the comparison does not hold. British music has been shaped by African and Caribbean influences so profoundly that they are now simply called British music. British cinema, at its best, has told stories from the full breadth of the immigrant and diaspora experience. British literary fiction, with notable and celebrated exceptions, has been slower.

Within African literature itself, the global Anglophone map is highly uneven. Nigerian writers — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Chigozie Obioma — have achieved genuine international visibility. Kenyan literature has Ngugi wa Thiong'o. South African writing has J.M. Coetzee and a rich post-apartheid tradition. These are important voices, and their visibility matters. But the African continent is not a country. The Indian Ocean islands — Madagascar, Mauritius, the Comoros, Réunion — barely register on British publishing's radar at all.

There are 31 million stories waiting.

What Is Lost When These Stories Are Absent

The most obvious loss is epistemic. British readers who never encounter Madagascar in fiction are missing more than a setting — they are missing a way of understanding a significant portion of human experience. Most people in the UK could not name Madagascar's capital city. Most have no framework for understanding Malagasy family structures, spiritual practices, historical traumas, or contemporary anxieties beyond, perhaps, a David Attenborough documentary about lemurs.

Fiction is how empathy is built at scale. When a culture is absent from fiction, readers from that culture are denied a specific kind of recognition — the experience of seeing their own interior life reflected back at them in a form that says: your story is worth telling, your world is worth imagining. For Malagasy diaspora readers in the UK, many of whom grew up reading British school curricula heavy with canonical texts, this absence is not abstract. It is a daily experience of invisibility.

There is also a specifically literary loss. Malagasy oral tradition includes hainteny — a sophisticated form of proverbial poetry that operates through layered metaphor, call and response, and a philosophy of language entirely distinct from Western literary forms. This tradition has barely been introduced to Anglophone readers. The landscape of Madagascar — its ancient rainforests, its highland plateaux, its coastline — offers literary fiction terrain of rare power. These are not resources that have been explored and found wanting. They have simply not been explored.

And there is an economic loss publishers would do well to consider. There is a readership — diaspora communities, culturally curious readers, anyone exhausted by the same metropolitan settings in literary fiction — that publishers are systematically failing to reach.

The Tokenism Trap

When publishers do acquire African authors, those authors frequently report a particular kind of pressure: the expectation that their novel will represent an entire continent. A Nigerian novelist is not asked to speak for all of Nigeria; they are implicitly asked to speak for Africa. A Malagasy writer is asked to explain Madagascar. This is a burden placed on no British novelist writing about Britain, and it shapes what gets published. Stories that explain culture — that orient Western readers, that provide accessible entry points — are preferred over stories that simply exist within a culture on its own terms.

The diversity award landscape, despite genuine good intentions, can reproduce this problem. When African or Malagasy writing is published and positioned primarily as an act of representation, it is simultaneously elevated and ghettoised. The signal sent is: this book matters because of what it represents, not because of what it is. Good publishing looks different. It means acquiring a book because it is exceptional, marketing it as literary fiction rather than as cultural education, submitting it for mainstream prizes rather than only diversity-focused ones, and reviewing it with the same critical engagement given to any other literary novel.

The goal is not a separate shelf. The goal is the same shelf.

What Readers Can Do Right Now

The critical insight most readers do not fully appreciate is this: you have genuine power. Publishing is a commercial industry, and sales velocity matters enormously. When a book by an underrepresented author sells well, publishers take notice. When a debut from a small press outperforms expectations, agents begin looking for similar voices. Every copy sold sends a signal.

Beyond buying, there are specific actions that carry disproportionate weight. Leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads — even a short one — significantly affects a book's visibility in recommendation algorithms, and this effect is larger for small-press or debut titles than for established bestsellers. If you read a Malagasy or African literary novel and it moved you, three sentences on Goodreads is a genuine act of advocacy.

The Jhalak Prize is one of the most useful discovery tools for UK readers seeking literary fiction by writers of colour. The Africa Writes festival, hosted annually by the British Library, brings African writers and thinkers to UK audiences and publishes reading lists worth bookmarking. Both are starting points for readers who want to read more widely and do not know where to begin.

Request diverse titles at your local library. Libraries purchase based on reader demand, and a request costs nothing. If you run or belong to a book club, making an active choice to include African and Malagasy writing in your annual list is a small decision with a ripple effect. Talk about what you read on social media. Recommend across your networks. The algorithm rewards exactly this.

What Publishers and Agents Need to Do

The changes readers can make are meaningful but insufficient on their own. The structural problems in publishing require structural responses.

Agents and publishers need to acquire before an author has a platform. The logic of commissioning only writers who already have a significant following is self-fulfilling: it guarantees that underrepresented voices, who face additional barriers to building that following, remain underrepresented. Risk is part of publishing. It always has been.

Translation is an underused tool. Malagasy literature exists — in French, and in Malagasy itself. There are writers working right now whose work British readers will never encounter because no one has invested in bringing it into English. This is a choice, and it is reversible.

Publishers should stop asking diverse authors to perform cultural education in their author bios, their interviews, and their marketing copy. A Malagasy author should not be required to spend every public appearance explaining where Madagascar is. The marketing of diverse fiction should assume a readership curious enough to meet the book on its own terms.

Finally, genuine relationships with diaspora communities — not transactional outreach at the point of publication, but ongoing engagement — are how publishers learn what stories are waiting to be told.

The Next Great Voice May Already Be Writing

Madagascar's 31 million people include writers. They include storytellers working in traditions older and more intricate than most of what appears on British literary prize lists. They include voices that British readers have not heard, not because those voices are absent, but because the structures of publishing have not made space for them.

The Eucalyptus Tree is one small attempt to change that — to put Madagascar on the British literary map, not as a curiosity or an act of cultural education, but as a story worth reading on its own terms. One novel does not close a gap this large. But every novel that makes it through matters, because it makes the next one marginally more possible.

If this argument has persuaded you, the most direct thing you can do is read. You can start at the store on my website.