Authors Name Novels Schools Should Teach — SkimNews
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- The National Literacy Trust designated 2026 the National Year of Reading after figures showed reading enjoyment among 8-to-18-year-olds fell to a 20-year low of 32.7% in 2025, since ticking up to 36.1%.
- End Sexism in Schools' 2025 "Manopolies" report found 76% of students study JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls from 21 possible modern texts, with the play sitting on one exam board's set list for 39 years.
- GCSE set texts skew heavily male and narrow: 93% of students study either A Christmas Carol or Jekyll and Hyde as their 19th-century novel, and only 5% of students in England and Wales study a female-authored text.
- Nussaibah Younis recommends Percival Everett's The Trees, calling it a "blisteringly funny" satire on American racial violence inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till.
- Frank Cottrell-Boyce champions Ted Chiang's short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others, describing it as "a bold, brilliant, thrilling set of thought experiments."
- Hollie McNish advocates for Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese, writing that her own daughter's GCSE syllabus covered only male writers and was soaked in "blood, death, murder, violence."
- Ben Okri recommends his Everyman anthology African Stories, arguing that "an average Briton could go through a whole lifetime of wide reading without ever reading any classic African text."
Why it matters: With the Department for Education reviewing GCSE English and just 5% of students currently studying a female-authored text, these author endorsements add cultural weight to calls for mandatory rotation of set texts reflecting the gender balance and diversity of British classrooms.
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