A promise to read more ethnically diverse writers

Here's why I love books - they can take you to different lands, introduce you to different types of people, teach you about things you never knew. Books are diverse, and I love them for it.

So I was more than a little embarrassed to discover how undiverse the books I've read this year are when it comes to the ethnicity of their authors (there are lots of other kinds of diversity which are also missing in publishing, but I want to focus on ethnic diversity because it's of particular personal interest to me). I put together a list of my top summer reads for 2015, and all the authors on it were white. I didn't do this on purpose, and I only realised afterwards, once I'd read a critical piece about a best of summer reading list compiled by a newspaper. No one called me out on the lack of diversity of my list, but they should have.

Including the excluded: diversity in publishing

When I was young, my favourite books often featured female protagonists. I related to Frances Hodgson Burnett's Sara Crowe in A Little Princess, mainly because her name was Sara (it’s spelt a bit different, but I like to think it’s pronounced the same), and to Anne of Green Gables because she was a bit clumsy (although I never accidentally fed a friend wine instead of cordial), and I loved Roald Dahl's Matilda because she was a reader, just like me. But what all of these protagonists have in common is the fact that they are a little bit different. Because, in the absence of books with people who looked like me and my family, I had to seek out differences where I could.

It wasn't until I was about 10 that I finally found a book that featured a young Muslim girl as the main character - and I still treasure that copy of Anita Desai's The Peacock Garden. But while the character shared an ethnic and religious background with me, she still wasn't like me - a young British Muslim. Plus, the book was written in 1974, so it was hardly contemporary even when I was a child, as long ago as that seems.

I explain about my childhood reading because I think we're still largely asking the questions that I unconsciously asked myself as a voracious young reader - where are the books about people like me? Why is no one writing them? Is it because no one cares? Is it because I'm not important?