Written by Aishwarya KhoslaUpdated: September 21, 2025 09:26 PM IST 5 min readFor much of the 2oth century, the Great Male Novelist held a privileged perch. (Source: Unsplash)Every few years, the literary world ties itself into knots over a supposed extinction event. Once it was the death of the novel. Later, it was the eclipse of poetry. Today, it is the vanishing of the young, straight, white man. Prize lists, fellowship rosters and “books of the year” round-ups increasingly feature writers of colour, women, and queer voices. Against that backdrop, some are wondering where have the straight white men gone?The framing of the question reveals much. It assumes that the perspective of a white, heterosexual male is somehow the cultural baseline, against which everything else must be measured. For centuries, this demographic supplied the canon. Their crises were the world’s crises, their inner lives were treated as universal. Now that the landscape has widened, the absence of their dominance is being read by some as exclusion.A literary rebalancingBut is there really a disappearance, or only a decentring? The figures that circulate in these debates, prize longlists devoid of young white men, or fewer high-profile debuts by them, are hardly definitive. The sample sizes are small, and the literary marketplace is vast. Straight white men continue to write and publish. What has shifted is the automatic expectation that their work will sit at the centre of cultural attention.Also Read | Why Wuthering Heights is not a romance. The misreading of Emily Brontë’s classicLiterature has always been in conversation with power. For much of the 2oth century, the Great Male Novelist held a privileged perch, his private obsessions elevated into metaphors for the nation’s soul. But what once passed for universalism now feels narrow, even parochial. Readers want more than yet another retread of mid-century angst in a male key. They want stories that reflect the world as it is actually lived: fractured, plural, multi-voiced. To mourn the loss of the straight white male novelist, then, is to mourn the waning of his monopoly. (Source: Unsplash)The end of a monopoly in fictionTo mourn the loss of the straight white male novelist, then, is to mourn the waning of his monopoly. And perhaps that is no loss at all. After all, the history of literature is not a history of vanishing but of expansion. Women once excluded from publishing found their way in. Writers of colour claimed space in the canon. Queer writers redefined the emotional register of the modern novel. Why should straight white men be exempt from that churn?Yet it would be premature to declare them irrelevant. If anything, the discomfort of this moment is exactly what makes their perspective worth exploring — not as a dominant voice, but as one among many. We are living through a cultural realignment in which traditional forms of male privilege are being contested. That disorientation, that sense of displacement, is fertile ground for fiction. What could be more novelistic than the attempt to capture how it feels when the self is no longer assumed to be the measure of all things?There is also the question of what has drawn men away from literature. It is not only publishers and juries who have shifted focus. Many young men have simply stopped reading fiction, drawn instead into gaming, podcasts, or digital subcultures. The decline in male authorship may mirror a decline in male readership. If that is so, the problem lies less with gatekeepers than with changing habits of attention.Story continues below this adAlso Read | In despair after Osama killing, Pakistan leaders met at 6.30 am: Zardari aideNot vanishing, but evolvingNone of this means the straight white male novel is dead. It means that to endure, it must adapt. The swaggering voice of old, the novelist declaring his Americanness, his maleness, his entitlement to the universal, feels outdated. But novels that honestly examine what it is to be a man in an age of shifting identities and uneasy privilege can still resonate. Indeed, they may be essential, not because straight white men deserve our sympathy, but because fiction remains one of the best tools we have for mapping alienation.So yes, the cultural dominance of the straight white male novelist is over. That is not a tragedy; it is a rebalancing. What matters now is whether writers of all identities can find new ways to speak to the complexities of our age. The novel’s task has never been to preserve power. It has always been to render experience, in all its contradictions, with honesty and care.Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics. She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks. She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year. She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home. Write to her at aishwaryakhosla.ak@gmail.com or aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd