Race row spoils Penguin's birthday

Penguin was the publisher that defended DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover against censorship. It proudly protected its author Salman Rushdie when he was the subject of a fatwah. Yet on the eve of its 70th anniversary the illustrious firm is now in danger of condemnation itself.

To celebrate the birthday, Penguin is issuing 70 new short titles, or Pocket Penguins, drawn from its back catalogue of new work. Now, unexpectedly, the titles have provoked outrage and surprise because they include work by only two authors who are not white.

"It is monumental ignorance," said the writer and critic Bonnie Greer this weekend. "And it just won't do."

`white landmarks'

Although Penguin has published two of the most important figures in modern black literature, James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe, neither is included on a list that finds room for popular modern names such as Jamie Oliver, Marian Keyes, Gervase Phinn and India Knight, as well as paying tribute to significant white landmarks of world literature such as Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Theroux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigmund Freud and even Homer, a segment of whose Odyssey gets a look in.

The only two black authors included are Zadie Smith, the young Briton who made her name with the award-winning novel White Teeth, and Hari Kunzru, who is best known for The Impressionist and Transmission, and has a worldwide following.

"It is a glaring omission that they have left out someone like Baldwin," said the poet Lemn Sissay. "He is a black writer of incredible importance internationally and particularly in the United States. Maybe Penguin felt that he did not mean enough to British readers," he said.

"And aside from Zadie Smith, there are many great writers coming up at Hamish Hamilton, which is a Penguin imprint, and is where Ekow Eshun's new book, Black Gold of the Sun is coming out. Some of this should have been reflected in the birthday list," he added.

Greer feels the inclusion of Smith and Kunzru instead of, rather than in addition to, such revered names as Baldwin's or Achebe's was more than strange.

"It really is monumental ignorance, almost nauseating ignorance," she said. "I mean no Chinua Achebe, no Baldwin. It is incredible."

Baldwin is perhaps known best for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the essay collections The Fire Next Time and Nobody Knows My Name. He is regarded as crucial to the emergent black consciousness in American literature.

Achebe, 73, a Nigerian, is one of Africa's most admired writers. He rejected a national honor from his government last year in protest at the state of the country, which he said was "too dangerous for silence." His key work is his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. Tony Lacey, one of two Penguin bosses responsible for drawing up the initial list, said he did not remember the issue coming up: "We didn't want to make it entirely about the classics and we did want to make sure we had at least two poetry titles. The fact that race did not come up is either a good sign or a sign of our blindness, I suppose," Lacey added.

Penguin's list, historically, was not strongly representative of black writing.

"A small group of us chose the authors after consulting with others and then we went to the commissioning editors who decided the content," he said.