On 6th December 2023, a serious incident occurred at the Royal Society of Literature (RSL). The society’s director, Molly Rosenberg, cancelled publication of its annual Review as it was about to go to press, and fired its editor, Maggie Fergusson. Rosenberg objected to an article that mentioned “the devastating machinery of the Israeli state in operation” and had asked the editor to “lose these comments”.
At first Rosenberg denied that there was any connection between the “postponement” of the Review and the article that mentioned the machinery of the Israeli state. The RSL also denies that Rosenberg instructed the editor or anyone else to alter the copy or “‘censored’ any element of the magazine”. But statements from the designer Derek Westwood and Benjamin Myers, one of the authors of the offending piece, backed up Fergusson’s account. It was a clear case of censorship, and in the magazine of a writers’ society, during a period when freedom of expression is almost everywhere under threat, this was particularly damaging.
Fergusson, who is a fellow of the RSL, had edited the society’s Review for seven years and was considered an exceptionally conscientious and trustworthy colleague, having been the highly regarded secretary and then director of the society for 25 years before that. Anthony Gardner, the author, RSL fellow and founding editor of its magazine, told the New Statesman earlier this year: “Anyone who worked with Fergusson during her three decades of loyal service to the RSL knows her to be the soul of honesty; she had, moreover, no conceivable grounds for fabricating the claim. By accusing her of lying, [the RSL] has shown itself to be thoroughly unprincipled and aroused the indignation of the great majority of fellows.”
Fergusson says that the contents of the 2023 Review had been discussed with Rosenberg over the preceding months and had been approved two days earlier at the RSL council’s December meeting, when Rosenberg had given it an enthusiastic report.
The society’s leadership responded to protests by ignoring them
On 21st March 2024, the novelist William Boyd urged Rosenberg and the chair of the RSL council, the poet Daljit Nagra, to call an EGM, or Extraordinary General Meeting. “Silence does the RSL no favours – it raises implications of guilt and/or indifference,” he wrote. He received no acknowledgement or reply. This secretive attitude reflected the contempt in which the council apparently held the fellowship.
The incident triggered widespread anger among RSL fellows, but the society’s leadership responded to the protests by ignoring them. A few days after Boyd’s call for an EGM, on 24th March, Michael Longley, a former Ireland Professor of Poetry, emailed Rosenberg and Nagra: “When I learned of Maggie Fergusson’s fate I wrote to her… This loyal and talented colleague should be cherished by an institution such as yours…” He received a couple of politely evasive sentences from Rosenberg in reply.
In an open letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 16th February, a group of 15 fellows led by Jeremy Treglown and including Geoff Dyer, Roy Foster and Alan Hollinghurst, revealed that Rosenberg had declined to meet them, but mentioned friendly conversations with Nagra, and urged the RSL to refer itself to the Charity Commission to investigate the reports of an attempt to censor the Review. The letter concluded: “We value council members’ voluntary services [and] wish them well in their deliberations.” The RSL described such courteous correspondence as “showing a lack of respect”, for it questioned “the trustees’ work and the careful consideration they have given to these matters, as well as the conclusions they reached”. It said it had “nothing further to add—neither would it be appropriate for us to do so”.
The protests grew as it gradually became clear that the society was being transformed by a dominant group on its council without warning or discussion, and that the high bar set for election to a fellowship had been drastically lowered. The RSL was set up under royal charter in 1820 with a mission, to quote its constitution, “to honour and encourage great writers and engage people in literature”. Its heart is the fellowship, which has traditionally enforced strict criteria for election. Under the bylaws, nominations are restricted to writers who have produced “two works of ‘outstanding literary merit”. Candidates have to be proposed and seconded by existing fellows, and their election has to be approved by the council.
But in 2021 a new leadership team, headed by Nagra and the novelist Bernardine Evaristo, started to dismantle the rigorous election process and replace it with a social engineering project under which the “elitist” notion of excellence would be abandoned and, in the words of Evaristo, the RSL would be transformed into “a society open to all writers”. “The Open Initiative” plan, first announced in 2020, had been devised “to nominate 60 fellows from diverse backgrounds”, which would shake off the RSL’s elitist image through “the inclusion of people of colour, LGBTQ+ writers and the disabled”. Nominations, some of which came from the public, were submitted to a panel led by Evaristo and Nagra, with their choices announced in two tranches in 2022 and 2023. This innovation, Evaristo explained, was designed to attract a broad range of writers from “different parts of the UK, from different communities, and a different demographic”.
Philip Hensher, a fellow since 1998, disagreed with Evaristo’s basic assertion. “The idea that the society used to be a closed shop for the white middle classes until recently is false,” he said, pointing out that past and present fellows included Chinua Achebe, Nadeem Aslam, Tash Aw, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Shusaku Endo, Amitav Ghosh, Ved Mehta, RK Narayan, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith and Wole Soyinka, among many others, with Endo and Narayan also recipients of the highly prestigious Benson medal. VS Naipaul, who grew up in Trinidad’s Indian community, was made a Companion of Literature, the society’s highest honour, in 1994, years before he won the Nobel prize. Hensher recalled that Naipaul had first been elected to a fellowship in 1962, when he was only 30.
Nonetheless, the Open Initiative was supported at first by many fellows elected under the traditional procedure. Efforts to diversify the fellowship had started in 2014 during the presidencies of Colin Thubron and Marina Warner, and in 2018 the RSL had introduced a scheme called “40 Under 40”, in order to recruit younger fellows. Had the leadership consulted the fellowship about the Open Initiative, by summoning an EGM in 2020, they might even have gained majority approval for a change in the bylaws governing elections.
But there was no consultation and it quickly became evident that the scheme was being used to put forward candidates whose only apparent qualification, in many cases, was that they matched the new “demographic”. Despite these changes, Nagra asserted in February that “the requirements for fellowship remain the same” as in previous years, even claiming that “it’s actually harder now than ever before to become a fellow”, while Evaristo argued in the Guardian that “the system for appointing fellows adheres to the same publication rules as before. Existing fellows make nominations that are discussed and voted on by panels of fellows, trustees, vice-presidents, the president and presidents emeriti. The results are then ratified by the only group to hold constitutional power, the council.” These explanations ignored the fact that many of the candidates were nominated by the public, and elected by a panel including eight writers who were not members of the council.
Don Paterson, a holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, spoke for many in a succinct message to the council. “I’m writing this in good faith; I have no wish to see the RSL do anything but succeed… But it would help us all greatly if the board would… explain how some (often indisputably talented) writers who have gained their fellowship… apparently managed this without ‘two works of outstanding literary merit’. One seems to have published a single poetry pamphlet.” He received no acknowledgment or reply.
Michael Longley denounced the new system and felt “very concerned about the scrapping of long-established procedures for electing new fellows… The whole function and ethos of the RSL has been radically changed without a proper mandate from the fellows. Serious damage has been done. May I suggest that the RSL starts to staunch the wounds by calling an EGM,” he wrote—to no effect.
On 2nd April, the novelist Rose Tremain and her husband, the biographer Richard Holmes, wrote to Nagra setting out their “dismay” at “the changed election procedures [and] the high-handed sacking of Maggie Fergusson”, requesting “an open response” from the RSL. They received no acknowledgement or reply.
Fellows including Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Pullman, Hermione Lee and Salman Rushdie have demanded an extraordinary general meeting
The council’s failure to respond to the concerns raised by its fellows brought to a head numerous concerns about the way in which the society had been managed over the previous three years under the elusive, some would say furtive, chairmanship of Nagra. In March, in an open letter to the Times, 69 fellows including Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hermione Lee and Salman Rushdie demanded an EGM. There was no response, but during the row it had become clear that the Open Initiative candidates had been elected in breach of the society’s governing bylaws on nominations by two RSL fellows, and on producing two works of outstanding merit as agreed by the council. So in April a group of fellows, led by two ex-presidents, Thubron and Warner, referred the RSL to the Charity Commission, on grounds of mismanagement and a failure to meet its legal obligations, and asked the Commission to support the demands for an EGM.
A spokesperson for the RSL told Prospect: “This year the RSL has been dealing with some internal disagreements about decisions made by its governing body and executive. We have taken great care throughout the year to listen to all fellows, including a minority of fellows who are dissatisfied with what they perceive to be a change in direction of the RSL’s work. We look forward to turning our attention to our plans for 2025, which include opening applications for our newest literary award, the expansion of our engagement programme and the rollout of our fellowship election process so that members of the public are able to recommend writers for fellowship.”
Many RSL fellows have spoken of the tremendous honour of being elected to a fellowship, among them Hensher and Victoria Glendinning. The latter described it as “an honour like no other… We are elected not by some faceless bureaucratic committee but by our fellow writers and professional peers. Fellowship means everything to me.” A recently elected fellow, Karin Altenberg, said: “There is something wonderful about being elected by my peers and not… as part of any agenda—a sense of being included in that fellowship because of literary worth.”
The society has traditionally been run on a basis of honour, courtesy and integrity. It has also, traditionally, been very short of money. In the 1990s it was forced to sell its library and archives to Cambridge University, but the penury continued. In 2019 the president in office, Warner, wrote to the fellowship, appealing for donations. The letter mentioned the RSL’s “tight budget and small staff team” and disclosed that, despite a reduction in expenditure, the society still needed “£20,000 to support its core costs”. It was after this letter was circulated that the RSL received a lifesaving donation from the Hawthornden Foundation of £1m. At almost the same time it gained a new president and a new chair of council. The new team promptly set off on a spending spree.
Staff numbers were increased and the director’s empire grew. The RSL acquired a head of operations and three separate managers—of “public events”, “engagements and participation”, and “marketing and administration”. These innovations seem to have been expensive. The accounts show that, since Nagra became chair in January 2021, spending has risen by 34.6 per cent.
The most noticeable change was the arrival of a two-strong comms team under a director of communications, Catherine Riley. Riley, being an experienced professional, promptly introduced a convoluted system under which free “communication” became more or less impossible. Press enquiries were shunted off to an external PR agency, while fellows were directed towards the complaints button on the website. They were assured that, if they used the button, any queries they raised would be answered “within eight weeks”. The button has since been removed.
Two weeks after the dismissal of Fergusson, Riley contacted contributors to the postponed edition of the Review with a soothing message. “It’s an exciting time of change for us,” she wrote. “We have been thinking of ways to engage with more fellows in the creation of our magazine, and to update its design as part of the RSL’s brand refresh. This work is ongoing, so we have decided to postpone the upcoming edition to the spring when we will also introduce… a roster of guest curators.”
This letter did not have the intended effect. In further evidence of attempted censorship, one contributor, Zachary Leader, reported that the management had offered him “participation in an RSL event” instead of publication of the tribute to Martin Amis he had written. And Fergusson considered Riley’s letter to contributors so misleading that she decided to circulate a more accurate version of what happened. It was at this point that it all became too much for Nagra. He accused Fergusson of “data breaches” (Fergusson has said that if there were any such “breaches”, they would have been cases of justified whistleblowing) and one of his own trustees of “sharing confidential information”. Evaristo then issued a message headed “Cease and Desist” to council members, a legal threat designed to close down further opposition. Under this level of pressure, the council of the RSL split into factions. A minority of trustees began to feel seriously intimidated and one of them resigned in consequence.
Continuing the attack early in February, Riley issued a statement saying that Fergusson had not been fired because she had known for a year that she would be leaving in December. Fergusson was outraged. Her response was to produce conclusive evidence that this could not be true. It included an email correspondence with Nagra contradicting his claim that they had discussed her standing down in 2022.
And when Fergusson asked why, if the RSL account of her departure was true, it had taken the directorate nearly two months to mention it, she received no reply. Instead, the society’s PR agents told two national newspapers that Fergusson was being “dishonest” in claiming that Rosenberg had instructed her to “lose” the comments about the Israeli state. Months later, Nagra, when challenged by me and others in a meeting with fellows, described the suggestion of dishonesty as an “awful misjudgement”. Even so, he has steadily declined to withdraw or apologise for it.
As the complaints continued to flood in, the PR agency hired by the RSL announced in February that the society had referred itself to the Charity Commission, since its staff were being harassed by “a sustained campaign of misinformation against it”—the society’s way of describing a stream of courteous and patient enquiries. Evaristo decided to defend her policy in a series of newspaper interviews, notably with the Guardian. The organisation “needed to change”, she said. It should no longer have a bias towards writers who live in London, “who are white and middle class. No single group within the fellowship should feel they own it”.
This justification infuriated Longley, who lives in Belfast: “I have always considered it a great honour to be a fellow of the RSL,” he responded in writing to the RSL leadership. “I believe I was elected because of the several collections of poetry I had then published, and that my being white, middle-aged and middle-class had nothing to do with it. I have harassed no one, made no claims on ‘ownership’ of the society, and been completely unaware of any ‘campaign’. These allegations are quite uncalled for.”
It was Trevor Phillips, former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who pointed out that, in the context of the culture wars, “equality” usually means “control”—and the suppression of free speech. The long-running battle to protect the society that honoured and encouraged the best in new writing can be seen as a classic engagement in the culture wars. But, in a world that obediently prioritises EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) over excellence, it also raises questions about free speech and the vital role of literature.
The right to free speech has twice been threatened by the current leadership of the RSL. In 2021, during Warner’s presidency, the children’s author and RSL fellow Kate Clanchy became the target of a Twitter mob who were attacking her memoir of teaching English to teenagers, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Clanchy had been accused of racism and stereotyping her former pupils. The students in question supported her, and praised everything she had done for them, while Clanchy apologised and re-edited the book, which had won the Orwell Prize. But as the Twitter attacks grew, the book was pulped and she lost her publisher and livelihood.
Troubled by this, Warner suggested that the RSL should issue a statement in support of Clanchy, who was being vilely abused. But this proposal was vociferously opposed by a faction of the council, supported by Nagra, then the newly appointed chair. Permission for a public event to discuss the effects of social media on writers and their work was also refused. In August 2021, Philip Pullman, also an RSL fellow, resigned as president of the Society of Authors (SoA) after that organisation distanced itself from comments he made in defence of Kate Clanchy, as he realised he could not be free to express his personal opinions while he held the role.
In the following year, when Salman Rushdie was the victim of a knife attack in New York, Warner and many fellows, including Hermione Lee, wanted the RSL to issue a statement in support of freedom of expression, but they were again overruled by Nagra and Rosenberg, this time supported by the new president, Evaristo. The reason given was that such a move “might give offence”. Nagra subsequently claimed that the RSL had supported Rushdie, but this “support” turned out to be a note in the Review where he wrote that he was “deeply saddened” by the attack, adding the rather superfluous comment that the RSL “did not condone violence towards authors on the grounds of their views”. Nagra then added a more revealing qualification: “Free speech is of course a complicated issue that is bound by a series of responsibilities.”
The treatment of Clanchy was arguably the biggest blot on the record of the current RSL management. One of the cheerleaders for the attacks on Clanchy was Sunny Singh, a professor at London Metropolitan University. She describes herself on her university’s website as “a pre-eminent decolonising public intellectual and novelist”. In 2020 she twittered: “I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say No. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.”
Singh has apparently been described as “a globally acclaimed, critically renowned novelist and internationally reputed academic of the arts and social sciences”. Furthermore “her professional output transcends academia and extends into public discourse and advocacy”.
It was presumably in this last role, of public advocate, that she turned her attention to Clanchy. When a newspaper report mentioned that Clanchy’s mother had died of Covid, alone and in a care home, Singh took the opportunity to mock the author’s grief.
“Thinking of running a competition to describe the weepy lady writer and her ineffectual white knight [a reference to Pullman]. How would you describe them?” she tweeted. When her students offered a selection of sexual remarks and analogies to vomit and cheese, the “public intellectual” responded with “Yowzah!” and emojis of applause. And this despite the fact that Singh and others had reported that they too had been the target of vile racist abuse on social media.
In her resignation letter, subsequently published in a blog in February, Clanchy wrote: “I used to tell my students in the school library to write their feelings as honestly as they could and so be guided to their thoughts. I told them that was how excellent writing was attained, through truthfulness and integrity of mind. I told them not to be afraid.” She added: “I thank the society very much for my years of fellowship but now that… the RSL has honoured someone who had publicly jeered at my grief, who I felt had spat on my mother’s grave… I would lack integrity if I continued in fellowship.”
Clanchy resigned from the RSL in 2023. She received no acknowledgement of or reply to her resignation letter, but Rosenberg circulated it to the trustees with a request that they should give it no publicity. Meanwhile, almost unbelievably, Singh was bundled into a fellowship under the Open Initiative in 2023.
Early in 2024, the beleaguered trustees of the RSL decided to commission an independent governance review from the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). At the time of writing, the NCVO’s report, like the final ruling of the Charity Commission on the necessity of an EGM, is still awaited. Meanwhile, the triumvirate continue to swing their wrecking ball. In the most recent published accounts, for the 12 months ending December 2023, the deficit totalled £322,000, which suggests that about half of the Hawthornden money has already been spent.
Despite her denials of censorship, the interventions of Rosenberg have been increasingly destructive. When she was questioned at the 2023 AGM by Miranda Seymour, Rosenberg explained that the RSL could not support Rushdie “because we are not a political organisation… and fellows may have different views”. Seymour subsequently resigned her fellowship. Nor was the postponement of the Review the director’s first attempt to censor the work of fellows. In 2020 she removed from an obituary of Jan Morris all mention of the fact that Morris had started life as “James”. The article had been written by Morris’s long-standing friend and literary agent Derek Johns. But every mention of “James” had to be removed until Rosenberg—who denies reports that she described Morris as someone who had “not been a good ambassador for the trans community”—would approve publication. Johns said: “Molly Rosenberg never met Jan and knows nothing at all about her.” Johns then resigned his honorary fellowship.
In 2021, Rosenberg interfered with the publication of the retiring president’s farewell address. In her final speech, Warner had compared attacks on Twitter to the barbaric institution of the pillory, saying that “several writers are among those who have suffered this terrible punishment”. Warner also noted that, whereas courageous 18th-century publishers had sometimes been among the victims, “today the same spirit has been curbed by fear of being pilloried on social media”. This passage apparently displeased Rosenberg, who may have taken it as a reference to her own refusal to support Clanchy. She could not change the president’s text, so she changed its title—from “A Farewell Address” to “A Personal Note”.
The director’s attempts to remove the comments about the Israeli state from the Review continued into January 2024, but as the situation slipped beyond her control, she was forced to publish the entire article when the redesigned Review appeared in the spring. However, there was no sign of the promised “guest curator”—the original excuse for Fergusson’s dismissal. Instead, editing was by an anonymous “RSL team”, which presumably meant Rosenberg and Catherine Riley. The “brand refresh” featured “an Illustrator in Residence”, a hideous cover and 140 photographs of its contributors—including a full-page colour study of the president. It was described in the TLS as “a fatuous revamp”.
As the year went by, the director dropped out of public view, leading Anne Chisholm—a vice president and former chair of council—to write to other fellows: “I’m struck by how all along Molly, who has done more than anyone to create this mess, has never herself answered a single question or complaint.”
The president, meanwhile, goes from strength to strength. In retrospect it is possible to see Evaristo’s tenure as entirely predictable. She has been a tireless crusader for black women’s writing since she left Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls in 1977. The Booker prize that she shared with Margaret Atwood in 2019 made her a role model for her community. But her reductionist habit of classifying writers by their colour, age, gender, class and place of residence can be misleading. She herself was born and brought up in a leafy suburb of Greenwich, where her mother was a schoolteacher. The novelist and RSL fellow Paul Bailey, who died in October, was—it is true—white, old and male, and also born in south London. But it was in Southwark, where his mother worked as a cleaner and his father as a road sweeper.
Evaristo is a formidable cultural operator, as her notice in Wikipedia confirms (at the last count there were 89 entries under “Awards and Recognition”). She must have been furious when Rosenberg’s clumsy attempts to relaunch the Review triggered an almighty row and placed the smooth operation of her project in jeopardy. But she kept her head, and as the dispute intensified she gradually faded out of the public picture. She slipped away from the AGM of 2023 when two fellows started to question the RSL’s failure to defend Rushdie. She has avoided direct engagement with the fellowship since her unfortunate reference to the need for “impartiality” following the stabbing of Rushdie was ridiculed. (Rushdie had tweeted, “Just wondering if the RSL is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?” Evaristo subsequently claimed that her comment had not been in reference to Rushdie.) And she recently announced that, as president, she was merely a figurehead and had nothing to do with the implementation of policy. (In fact, the president is ex officio a member of council, and the current policy was devised and launched by her.)
Evaristo also remains a highly visible presence in the RSL’s internal publicity material. The November newsletter, headed once again by a photograph of the president, advertised a forthcoming event in which “the Booker prize-winning legend that is Bernardine Evaristo revisits Mr Loverman, her beloved 2013 novel which has lately been adapted to brilliant effect on the BBC”. So the presidency has its uses, even for a figurehead.
Finally, there is Nagra, who more than anyone has been responsible for the RSL’s failure to address the unhappiness of the fellows. Under his leadership there has been a pattern of threats, silence, evasion and deceit. It is the chair who was responsible for allowing the situation to spiral out of control as disquiet spread among the fellowship and allegations mounted up. Instead of dealing with the damage to the good name of the RSL, he authorised the threatening message sent to council members headed “Cease and Desist”. In the summer he called a series of “consultations”, which he said would enable the council to understand the demands of fellows for an EGM. Those meetings led to nothing, and an assurance he gave to circulate the minutes of each meeting was broken.
Nagra, who was only elected to a fellowship in 2017, became chair of the council in 2021 and is due to retire at the end of the year. Interviewed by the Review on his appointment he betrayed a curious reaction. “ROYAL… SOCIETY… LITERATURE… You could not get more intimidating in three words, could you?” It would be interesting to know why he found this new distinction so intimidating. His biography confirms he was already an experienced literary politician who had judged numerous British literary prizes.
Literature has never been and never will be for everyone, as Richard Holmes emphasised in a letter to Evaristo. “You quite rightly say that ‘writing is for everyone’. But this cannot be said to mean that really good writing can be done by everyone. This is simply not the case.” The work of the 69 writers who signed the open letter printed in the Times is read by, or taught to, millions of readers all over the world every year, yet the trio who have taken over the RSL have the arrogance to condemn it as elitist or “exclusive”.
Referring to the RSL’s treatment of Rushdie and Clanchy, Hadley Freeman, in the Sunday Times, wrote: “When a literary society is more interested in the diversity of its writers than the quality of their writing and is more worried about causing offence than the physical safety of novelists, it has ceased to have any reason to exist.”
