Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, has released Common Interests, a six-part video series hosted by author Yara Rodrigues Fowler. The project asks what the UK’s literary ecosystem could look like if it were organized around writers and readers rather than capital, profits, bestseller lists, and algorithms. Its guests are workers from across the book world, including independent publishers, radical booksellers, organizers, festival directors, critics, and authors, and the central question is how they can build collective strength and cross the borders that usually separate different sectors of publishing. The six conversations, with Azad Ashim Sharma, Lola Olufemi, Sam Fisher, Lucy Mercer, Keiran Goddard, and Meera Ghanshamdas, are available on Wasafiri’s YouTube channel.
The series arrives at a tense moment for the industry. After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, publishers made grand promises about diversity. Since then, as Rodrigues Fowler notes in the opening, those promises have been walked back. The Guardian reported a steep decline in children’s books with Black protagonists between 2023 and 2025, anti-woke imprints have appeared, and writers who organized in solidarity with Palestine through Fossil Free Books faced heavy backlash. For African writers watching from the continent and the diaspora, where so much of the international market runs through London, it is a useful conversation to overhear.
That is why Olufemi’s episode stands out. The British writer, who is of Nigerian descent, is the author of Feminism Interrupted (Pluto Press) and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press), and her third book, Against Literature, is forthcoming from Peninsula Press. Her opening argument is that the diversity push was a representational politics with no material basis. Publishing, she says, promised futures to writers of colour while ignoring the pay gaps that shape who gets to write at all, and the beneficiaries were mostly writers who were already moneyed and embedded in the industry. Drawing on Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s idea of elite capture, she argues that corporations absorbed the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement while ignoring its demands to abolish the police and prisons and to end austerity.
From there the conversation turns to how the industry works. Olufemi points to the consolidation of once-independent publishers into multinationals such as Penguin Random House and to Amazon’s dominance of online book sales, and she argues that the removal of the Net Book Agreement brought free-market competition into publishing. She also says that the Big Five fail even on their own terms, because they are poor at getting complex literature to the working-class readers who might love it. Her answer is collective organizing, not individual success: writers should join unions, find their local campaign group (she cites Fossil Free Books as a model), and look to earlier generations of writers who organized, such as the 1950s Afro-Asian Writers Conference and the international book fairs of Jessica and Eric Huntley in London. Her vision of a rebuilt industry rests on shared ownership, a cooperative where “sometimes you edit my writing, and sometimes I edit yours,” and the revival of pamphlets and other radical print cultures. Her goal, she says, is to free writing “from the clutches of corporations and conglomerates.”
She also shares her own numbers, which writers on both sides of the Atlantic may find useful. She received no advance for her first book, around £800 to £900 for her second, and about £5,000 for her third, and she supports her writing with a university lectureship and freelance work. She is a member of the UCU and the Society of Authors. The whole six-part series is worth watching if you want to follow the discussion on how the people who make books, rather than the corporations that sell them, might share power. You can watch Olufemi’s episode here.
