She is anxious not to criticise an industry that loved her debut so much it went to a six way auction in the UK, and is at pains to stress that with Wahala she wrote the novel she wanted to write without interference from her editors. But she’s far from alone in thinking that diversity can sometimes feel like a hollow slogan in publishing, given the less visible prejudices surrounding the sorts of stories many black writers feel permitted to tell. 

We’ve come along way since 1561, when John Lok sailed to West Africa and described in his journal that the people he met were “beasts who had no houses”, as quoted by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a 2009 Ted Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, but perhaps not so much as we might like to think. 

As recently as 2005 the late Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina published a satirical essay in Granta entitled “How to Write About Africa” in which he mockingly advised aspiring black writers to “make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat”, in scathing response to a culture hooked, as he saw it, on reductive stories about race. 

Today there remains a general implicit consensus that black writers should write novels that prioritise racial experience over everything else. “If you are a black writer and you are not writing about people overcoming oppression, or if your novel isn’t set in Peckham, then the industry doesn’t know where to put you,” says May. “You basically have to either write about black trauma or black joy. The lack of nuance is striking.”

Brandon Taylor, whose debut novel Real Life was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, admits that he is constantly trying to get his publisher “to stay away from words such as raw and visceral and brutal” when it comes to marketing his work. “I’ve made it my business to reject anything that smells even vaguely like an already made idea about blackness,” he says. “It’s so dull on the one hand and offensive on the other.” Real Life follows a queer black graduate at a university in the Midwest, but when it came to the US promotional campaign, early copy implied the book was about an abusive, violent rural Alabama childhood.