Hachette to expand and relaunch Future Bookshelf with new schemes

Hachette UK is launching a new writing initiative for Black, Asian and underrepresented voices, as part of its expansion of the Future Bookshelf Scheme.

Celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, The Future Bookshelf forms part of Hachette UK’s Changing the Story programme and was set up to help and discover unpublished, underrepresented authors.

From 2022 it will encompass all of Hachette UK’s creative writing programmes focused specifically on diversity and inclusion, starting with Modern Stories.

Modern Stories, the first of six initiatives, will aim to grow the online creative writing community. The inaugural brief is to write a commercial crime or thriller novel about "a relationship that isn’t what it seems" and can include any sub-genre of writing, from psychological or domestic suspense to detective fiction or action thriller. It will be run by Headline Publishing Group and launches today (4th February).

A team of bloggers will help to judge the shortlisted entries, including The Candid Book Club, Shikha Chopra of Unfolding Pages, Amyn Bawa-Allah of LipGlossMaffia and Nicola Soremekun of Booked Up and Busy.

Shortlisted candidates will receive editorial feedback and a follow-up session with an editor, while one writer will be offered a full publishing contract with Headline.

Co-chaired by Nick Davies, m.d. of John Murray Press and patron of Changing the Story, and Rhiannon Smith, editorial director of Fleet, the Future Bookshelf will also roll out five more projects across the course of the year, offering new mentoring opportunities to aspiring writers. 

In a joint statement, Davies and Smith said: “We’re delighted to be announcing the new format of The Future Bookshelf with Headline’s Modern Stories initiative. We’re looking forward to enabling more projects from across Hachette in the future, with plenty of exciting announcements to come, including from the Mo Siewcharran Prize, Thrive’s Grow Your Story, and some brilliant partnerships with major literary agencies. Watch this space."

To date, the scheme has helped to discover writers including Elizabeth Wong, author of We Could Not See the Stars (John Murray Press); Eleni Kyriacou, author of She Came to Stay (Hodder & Stoughton); Rebecca Zahabi, author of Tales of the Edge (Gollancz); Elizabeth Okoh, author of The Returnees (Hodder & Stoughton); and Robert Hamberger, author of A Length of Road (John Murray Press).

The Candid Book Club added: “We are absolutely delighted to be on the judging panel for the Headline Modern Stories initiative, alongside some other wonderful book bloggers. We’re always on the lookout for new voices from underrepresented communities, and so we are very much looking forward to candidly reviewing the shortlisted books and sharing our thoughts with everyone. This is an exciting opportunity for the candidates, and we are privileged to be a part of their writing journey.”