Lionel Shriver has responded to the vituperative row that followed her recent comments about Penguin Random House’s diversity scheme, saying that it was not diversity but quotas that she was objecting to and calling out what she described as the “malicious misinterpretation” of her original essay.
In a piece for the Spectator this month, Shriver objected to the publisher’s goal for its staff and authors to represent UK society by 2025. “Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’etre as the acquisition and dissemination of good books,” she wrote. “Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision.”
Authors including Hanif Kureishi and Meena Kandasamy hit back at Shriver for her comments and she was dropped as a judge for a short story competition set up by the magazine Mslexia. An open letter from the 2016 cohort of WriteNow mentees – a project set up by PRH to support writers from minority backgrounds – said that “Shriver seems to view diversity and quality as mutually exclusive categories”.
She has now replied in a second column in the Spectator, saying that she supports a similar diversity programme at HarperCollins and that “such proactive outreach is exactly the approach I endorse for helping to vary the voices on our bookshelves”.
She had not taken exception to the WriteNow programme, she stressed. What she objected to was PRH’s quest to have its staff and authors mirror the UK population by 2025, because she dislikes “diversity quotas, in publishing or anywhere else”.
“To the degree that PRH genuinely aims to ply its wares among minority communities with historically few readers, brilliant. That is thinking like a publishing company, whose driving purpose should be expanding its market and selling more books,” she wrote. “Nevertheless, the manifestation of a narrow, rigid version of diversity, rather than strong book sales and literary excellence, can too easily become an end in itself. With the relinquishment of judgment abundantly on merit, quality could suffer.”
Shriver said the US’s history of affirmative action and positive discrimination has “entrenched racial divisions and pitted minorities against one another”, and that “combatting injustice with more injustice, and racism with more racism, is philosophically contradictory and pragmatically ham-fisted”.
Shriver described the response to her previous column as “hysteria” and “outrage [as] the left’s contemporary drug of choice”.
“The leap is Olympian: Shriver thinks only white people can write. Shriver wants to protect publishing from the barbarians. Shriver thinks diversity necessarily translates into rubbish books. Shriver is a literary white supremacist,” she wrote, describing her reaction to these interpretations as “something between cynicism and bewilderment”.
Addressing the WriteNow mentees, she wrote: “That column wasn’t hard to understand, and I can’t imagine your reading comprehension scores are quite that low. So we’re dealing with what I can only call malicious misinterpretation. No writer can defend against wilful misreading.”
Shriver finished by saying that she has the same ambition as the WriteNow mentees – “that in due course, after enough open-mindedness, mutual curiosity and steady incremental progress, occupations like ours are naturally and effortlessly populated by folks from a wide range of backgrounds”.
“We only differ on how we get there. I wouldn’t do it with quotas. Because diversity doesn’t lower standards. Quotas do,” said Shriver.
