Men aren’t disappearing from fiction, truth revealed

NEW YORK

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David Szalay poses for photographers with the trophy after winning the Booker Prize 2025 for his book 'Flesh' during a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.

(File/Associated Press)

Tobi Coventry is invisible, yet he is here. A debut novelist writing about desire and, inadvertently, masculinity: the kind of man, we've been told for the past five years, no longer exists.

Or at least could not win the Booker Prize without causing a strange cultural shudder. He spends his days reading for a living, scouting books before they surface, digging through the backlist to find stories that might translate to screens. So when the book scout-turned-author read The Guardian's view of the Booker — literary fiction “hard to find”, David Szalay’s win putting “masculinity back at the centre of literary fiction” — he wondered, simply: what?

“Some of the best new books come from men and some of them come from women, and I've never sat there and thought, ‘God, I'm really waiting for a book from a man to come along,” Coventry says from his home office in Rye. Behind him are bookshelves filled with the works of authors of all genders. And then he begins to list these supposedly nonexistent men: the prolific Ben Myers, with his short-story collection Male Tears; Douglas Stuart; Michael McGee; Paul Mendez; Tony Tulathimutte; Djamel White. He notes that women, too, write about young men and masculinity — and I would add writers like Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, whom The Guardian mentions even as it claims such writing is lacking, attributing that absence to the supposed dominance of their “female interiority.”