trans activists
© Brighton PicturesPublish and be damned: Sussex University protesters rallying against Kathleen.
Mavericks, apostates, contrarians: all are welcome at Forum, a new publishing imprint catering to the "politically homeless". As the industry finds itself lurching from one cancel-culture row to the next, with authors seeing their books commissioned and then scrapped before even reaching publication, the outfit - current team size: one - hopes to become the "go-to publisher for anyone who doesn't easily fit in with the orthodoxies and intellectual policing that have become so common in the 21st century".

It's being headed up by George Owers, a 33-year-old ex-Labour councillor and "Tory socialist" who has strong opinions about the current state of the industry. "There's a lot of spinelessness in publishing [and] a very narrow band of political views," he says when we meet in a Cambridge pub. "You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who votes Tory, or even somebody who has the views that 90 per cent of the rest of the population have on all kinds of issues like Brexit or trans rights."

This groupthink, Owers believes, is doing readers a disservice. "People are sick of the same old stuff and they want to hear a different perspective." Indeed, the "cancelled" could prove to be a literary cash cow - both in terms of demand, and because authors deemed too unpalatable to be published elsewhere come to presses like Forum "cheap".

Forum's first book is the UK edition of Woke Racism, a critique of the anti-racism movement by African-American professor of linguistics John McWhorter. In less than a month of operation, they have signed journalist Ed West, whose book, Brahmins, will explore the new conservatism among the West's ruling class, and Dr Tony Sewell, who chaired last year's controversial government race report and is writing a challenge to preconceived ideas about the modern black experience.

The ongoing rows between the generations - on matters of race and gender, borders and sexuality - promise to be a rich seam for new material. But does the world really need more fuel added to the culture-war flames? In the US, independent publisher Skyhorse has scooped up a whole host of "deplorables" dropped by larger publishing houses, including conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine crusaders.

Owers says he won't take on authors for the sake of it. "If what they're arguing is of no merit, or is pure provocation with no real argument, I don't want to publish it." That said, he "will publish people who push the boundaries quite far". How far are we talking? Nazi apologists are (probably) out - because "there's just never going to be a Nazi apologist who's going to write a very intellectually rigorous book that's going to sell many copies".

But on nation states, and gay marriage, he has no fear of publishing controversial views, if they "make a good argument". Provided his conscience is satisfied, "I don't care what a bunch of 19-year-old gender-studies undergraduates think."

Owers is a millennial Brexiteer with a PhD from Cambridge in the history of political thought, who typically speaks at a mile-a-minute, clenching his eyes shut when particularly stirred. He thinks "a lot of outrage now is either confected or illegitimate" and has friends who have fallen victim to the current puritanism. In one case, an author's manuscript made it past the commissioning stage, but was then returned immediately prior to publication with significant revisions (in spite of final versions having been signed off months earlier).

Another author I contacted for this piece had their book on imperialism dropped by the major publisher they first signed with. Having finally found a home for it elsewhere, they refused to speak on the record until its publication, so as not "to tempt woke zealots to try and derail it a second time".

These skirmishes are often the result of complaints from junior staff at a publisher, other authors signed to the title, or social-media naysayers searching for scalps, and have created a situation, according to Owers, in which editors are now "terrified of being accused of wrongthink [if] they allow a book to be published which is deemed to be out-of-bounds".

"I think it's pathetic, to be honest," he adds. As well as having a chilling effect on freedom of thought, it also leaves authors without stability, working with editors who clearly don't support their writing, and wondering when, during the years-long process from commission to publication, the axe will fall. Since Forum launched, some have already told Owers that "it's really nice to have an editor who doesn't think I'm an a------e."

Kate Clanchy, a teacher of 30 years whose memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, saw her decade-long relationship with Picador aborted earlier this year following a cancel-culture maelstrom. Her 2019 book had initially been championed by her publisher as a celebration of her students' diversity, until a handful of writers on Twitter criticised some of Clanchy's descriptions, such as "chocolate-coloured skin" and "almond eyes".

She agreed that a revised version should be reprinted, with Picador passing it through "sensitivity readers", who assess work for offensive material. The readers disagreed on what the offensive parts were; the new version never appeared and, in January, Clanchy and Picador parted company "by mutual consent".

When I speak to Clanchy, 57, she is emotional, particularly on matters relating to her young charges, whose poems were featured in her anthologies and who no longer have the platform afforded to them by her books.

"I was trying to represent those young people, that was my life's work," she says. She also regrets the impact her case has had on other publishers, who are now "very, very anxious".

"They don't want what happened to me to [happen to] anyone else. But as no one is really sure what happened to me or why it happened, they don't really know how to avoid it."

Clanchy's memoir has since been reprinted by another publisher, Swift (Forum's parent company). And other writers have also switched to smaller presses after their longstanding relationships with larger imprints have turned sour. Ex-University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock; and Helen Joyce, author of last year's book Trans, which criticised transgender rights activists, are among those to have found new homes for their work - though whether booksellers will display them on shelves is another matter.

JK Rowling, whose views on the trans debate have seen her vilified on social media and by the actors her work made famous, has retained her relationship with her publisher, "because she's JK Rowling", says Owers. But she is among a minute coterie selling enough books to make them worth the backlash for big publishers.

A glut of "cancelled" authors is good news for the likes of Forum, of course. Owers says he is "very optimistic" about what is to come; while he doesn't expect their arrival to "drive cultural change in the wider publishing industry", he sees the outfit as a first step in challenging the "stranglehold" the industry finds itself in. "In a year's time," he says, "we hope Penguin and Picador will be terrified of us."