Main Edition
US
FR
January 8, 2025 - 7:00am
Farewell then, Molly Rosenberg and Daljit Nagra, respectively Director and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. Finally they have acknowledged the serious concerns authors have had about their leadership and have succumbed to the real consequences of their mismanagement of a once-great institution. Rather than facing a vote of no confidence at the upcoming AGM, they chose to resign.
They have been dodging scrutiny for years, aided by creaking, gentlemanly procedures. In 2022, the Society failed to defend Salman Rushdie after he was stabbed by an Islamist terrorist lest it should “cause offence”. Last year, Rosenberg sacked the editor of the RSL Review for including a displeasing sentence about Israel. In between times, Nagra opened the summer party with an invitation to jeer at me after my cancellation, celebrating the fact that Pan Macmillan had ceased distribution of my work.
Unhappy fellows have been calling for an emergency meeting since May last year, but to no avail. Even this meeting has been postponed since November and came with ambiguous information. It was not clear whether Nagra, whose term ended in 2024, had already had himself re-elected as chair by the trustees. Nor was it clear which of his fellow board members, some of them in place since 2015, had recently awarded the other a further four-year term. The RSL team, the email concluded magnificently, wouldn’t be answering any questions on any of this as it was the holidays.
Nevertheless, a meeting is on the cards at last, and for the first time in the organisation’s history, fellows have been invited to stand for and vote for three places on the board. After a year of compulsive secrecy during which the president sent a “cease and desist” letter to the board, this was a great relief. The reason for the new openness, it seemed, was a governance review undertaken — possibly under pressure from the Charity Commission to whom the RSL had referred itself — by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.
The review concluded that the RSL needs to be more transparent about its roles, accounts and by-laws. It needs to tidy up the website, create an EGM-calling mechanism, have proper board elections and generally start to behave like any other national organisation. Above all, the council needs to stop electing itself and its chair, the review stated.
This clear, practical report could save the institution. So many of its problems stem from the fact that the board is too close and too closed as well as fatally ideological. This leads to all sorts of narrowness: for example, more than half of public events in the last two years have featured a board member. Friends and relatives get elected to fellowships in ways which seem unfair, like Khadijah Ibrahiim, the former wife of board member Roger Robinson, who was elected a fellow last year although she has never published a book. Meanwhile accomplished writers like Hannah Sullivan, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and Samantha Harvey, winner of the Booker prize, remain out of the picture.
In this crucial area, though — the election of fellows — the review may be too late. In the autumn, without consulting any general meeting and in defiance of by-laws, the board changed the constitution to include fellowship nominations from the public. This may seem open and public spirited, but in practice the general public is not especially interested in new literary writers any more than it is in any esoteric art. The new committee created to stimulate and winnow these nominations will be likely, then, to have a lot of power. It will be headed, apparently in perpetuity, by Irenosen Okojie, Nagra’s Vice Chair and close associate.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeYou should check out Daljit Nagra’s poetry on his website if you have a taste for poems written by 10-year-olds.
I think this story is typical of may esteemed bodies and organisations.
Pity they were standing up for freedom of expression, creativity and new ideas.
Sounds like virulent DEI at work. It is axiomatic that it and the left generally kill everything they touch.
Note to editor of Unherd (stupid name).
There is very little interest amongst the 312 subscribers regarding self pitying liberal progressives. The top ranked comment has 0 upticks.
This pig needs slopping and a good snooze. Let’s all lend a hand.