Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025

An unexpectedly controversial news story hit the book world last month, concerning the announcement of a new literary publishing house. Ordinarily, such a thing would barely register notice outside of trade outlets or enthusiastic book clubs, but the launch of Conduit Books prompted a flurry of op-ed pieces across the broadsheets, much discussion online – and an unusual amount of invective.

This is because Conduit has a peculiar raison d’etre in that, initially at least, it will only publish novels written by men. “A modest attempt”, its mission statement reads, “to address the relatively recent scarcity of young or new male writers in the small world of UK fiction.”

So reduced is the existence of the male novelist in today’s literary landscape that they must be encouraged back from out of the shadows in which they’ve presumably been skulking and afforded a notionally safe space. People – and not only women – mocked the idea. Men? Sidelined?! ​So what is it like being one of the few male novelists publishing books about the male experience in 2025? As one of them tells me, “It’s lonely out there.”

Conduit’s founder, Jude Cook, a novelist and critic, was required to explain more than once why he felt there was a need for his imprint. “The publishing landscape has changed dramatically over the last 15 years, as a reaction to the male-dominated scene of previous generations,” he said recently, citing such familiar titans as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. While Cook was quick to note that a shift in authorial perspective – and gender balance – had been a long time coming, one consequence, he claimed, is that male authors are now “often overlooked”. Hence Conduit.

Cook is right. The bestseller lists these days comprise novels written predominantly by women (Bonnie Garmus, Kate Atkinson, Jennie Godfrey), but after centuries of male cultural supremacy, this can hardly be a problem. Can it?

The literary landscape has, with notable exceptions, almost always been dominated by men: Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, Philip Roth and John Updike, Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes. The Great American Novel was long presumed a mostly male affair (Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen) despite there always being persuasive evidence to the contrary (Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Donna Tartt, Joyce Carol Oates).

Today, a fittingly proportionate amount of books reshaping that cultural landscape are being written by women: Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, Patricia Lockwood, Ottessa Moshfegh, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Research into reading habits invariably concludes that women read far more than men do, while the publishing industry itself skews female, with women taking up the majority of editorial roles. To have more books representing women, then, makes sense.

John Niven: ‘Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it’ (Getty)

That said, in an ideal world (where few of us reside), there should be room for both. We read in the first place to better understand the world around us, and the people in it, and so we need a panoply of voices, opinions, and perspectives.

There are, of course, at least some men still writing books about men in 2025. John Niven is one of them. “Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

Niven, who is 58 years old and from Ayrshire in Scotland, has published 10 novels over the past two decades. His 2008 debut, Kill Your Friends, was a mercilessly witty satire of the music industry in which he had previously worked, with a side helping of serial killing that wouldn’t have been out of place in American Psycho. His latest, The Fathers, published this month, follows two Scottish men from very different sides of the tracks whose lives merge unexpectedly, and calamitously, the night their partners are in hospital giving birth.

Both John Niven and David Szalay’s books are written from the sort of male perspective that has fallen out of favour in recent years (Penguin Random House/Canongate)

An established author, Niven says he has a “small but loyal” following that enables him to keep writing. But it’s different for first-timers. He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.”

The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

In The Observer in 2021, a male literary agent said that whenever he sent out a new novel to editors, those editors were almost always female. “It’s not the gender makeup that bothers him,” the newspaper reported, “it’s the prevailing groupthink: the lack of interest in male novelists, and the widespread idea that the male voice is problematic.”

Niven’s own fiction is in many ways a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s, being, as it is, scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male. The Nineties in particular were a fertile ground for such writing, with a host of incoming thirtysomething male novelists like James Hawes, Tim Lott, Nick Hornby and, later, Tony Parsons.

But the appetite for those kinds of novels has now waned considerably. We no longer crave this particular male gaze, it seems. Hornby continues to publish novels but has diversified into screenwriting – as has Niven – while Parsons has turned to genre fiction. Wisely so, says Niven. “He writes crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

From its synopsis, one might expect Niven’s The Fathers to read like a knockabout comic novel best suited for cursory beach reading, but there is considerable depth and wisdom here. Its two protagonists negotiate the varying strata of male identity and macho bravado, alongside a lingering sense of insecurity and impostor syndrome. It’s terrific. Had it been published in 1996, it would likely have made quite the splash. (Still could, of course. Let’s not jinx things.) “But the climate has changed, and I get that,” Niven says. “I don’t know any young men who read fiction these days. Even I struggle! I mean, how can you compete with screens?”

Earlier this year, the Booker-nominated British-Hungarian writer David Szalay published his sixth novel, Flesh, which follows the travails of a young Hungarian, István, over many decades. István is a monosyllabic man not much given to self-expression, a conundrum for those around him. He has a lot of sex, but it’s unsatisfying, perhaps because István won’t allow himself the vulnerability of feelings. “It’s okay,” he says, time and again, the strong and mostly silent type. “I’m okay.”

David Szalay: ‘Martin Amis wrote from an utterly unashamed male perspective, and that doesn’t really happen any more’ (Jonas Matyassy)

Flesh is hypnotic in its masculine blankness. It feels rare, in 2025, to read such an unapologetically male novel.

“I was interviewed for a newspaper recently and asked whether it was possible to write like Martin Amis any more,” Szalay tells me from his home in Hungary. Amis, long regarded as the best prose stylist of his generation, created some particularly memorable male characters, among them those with intellectual pretensions (John Self in 1984’s Money, a drug-taking hedonist with a thing for prostitutes) or wideboy geezer-types (Keith Talent in 1989’s London Fields, fond of drugs and pornography).

“I said probably not, and that became the headline,” Szalay says, genuinely put out. “But I suppose I get it. Amis wrote from an utterly unashamed male perspective, and that doesn’t really happen any more. But I am not writing for men exclusively and never have. Writing from a male perspective should never mean that you are writing just for men, and the same applies the other way round.”

When I ask whether he ever feels a tendency to temper the behaviour of his male protagonists in keeping with the current, more self-aware, climate, he shakes his head. “To self-censor as a way to conform to some sort of idea of what is acceptable today can only make books boring,” he says. “But,” he concedes, “yes, we do seem to be in a climate now where, for one reason or another, that sort of frankness is frowned upon from the male perspective, while from the female, it’s encouraged.” Sally Rooney and Miranda July are apt examples of writers whose sexual candour is roundly celebrated.

Szalay sighs. This is difficult terrain to speak about, and navigating it can feel problematic. “As you have probably guessed by now, I don’t have any sort of polemical point to make about this subject,” he says. “I myself try to maintain a nuanced view.”

As no doubt will Conduit Books. Until we see the first fruits of their efforts, we continue to turn away from literary men. The lesser-spotted male novelist is still out there somewhere, albeit in greatly reduced numbers, and there are still brilliant books being published by them, the kind each of us might benefit from reading. We just have to go in earnest search of them.

“When you write a novel, you are offering your slant, your take,” says Niven. “All you can do is say: this is how the world winds up for me. And so if I do represent a currently underserved demographic, then I’m just happy to still be a part of it.”

‘The Fathers’ by John Niven and ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay are out now

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