How the leader of a Twitter mob became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

On December 6, 2023, a ‘serious incident’ occurred at the Royal Society of Literature.  The director of the RSL cancelled publication of the society’s annual Review when it was about to go to press, and fired its editor, Maggie Fergusson. The director, Molly Rosenberg, had objected to an article that mentioned ‘the devastating machinery of the Israeli state in operation’ and had asked the editor to ‘lose these comments’.

Fergusson, who is a Fellow of the RSL, had edited the Review for 7 years and was regarded as an exceptionally conscientious and creative colleague. She had been the highly regarded director for 25 years before that. The contents of the 2023 Review had been discussed over the preceding months with Rosenberg and had been approved two days earlier at the RSL Council’s December meeting (when Rosenberg had given it an enthusiastic report).

At first Rosenberg denied that there was any connection between the ‘postponement’ of the Review and the article that mentioned the Israeli war machine. But statements from the designer and the co-author of the offending piece backed up the editor’s account.  It was a clear case of censorship, and in the magazine of a writers’ society, during a period when freedom of expression is almost everywhere under threat, this was particularly damaging. 

The incident triggered widespread anger among the Fellowship of the RSL.  On 24 March the Irish poet Michael Longley emailed Rosenberg and the chairman of the RSL Council, Daljit Nagra:  ‘When I learned of Maggie Fergusson’s fate I wrote to her… This loyal and talented colleague should be cherished by an institution such as yours…’.  He received a couple of politely evasive sentences from Rosenberg in reply.  

As the protests grew the leaders of the RSL responded by ignoring them. On 21 March William Boyd urged Rosenberg and Nagra to call an Extraordinary General Meeting (an EGM). ‘Silence does the RSL no favours – it raises implications of guilt and/or indifference…’ he wrote. He received no acknowledgement or reply.  This secretive attitude reflected the contempt in which the Council apparently held the Fellowship.  

As the protests grew it became clear that the Society was being transformed by a dominant group on its Council without warning or discussion, and that the high bar set for election to a fellowship had been drastically lowered.  The RSL was set up under royal charter in 1820 with a mission, to quote its constitution, ‘to honour and encourage great writers and engage people in literature.’  The heart of the Society is the Fellowship which has traditionally enforced strict criteria for election.  Under the byelaws, nominations are restricted to writers who have produced two works of ‘outstanding literary merit’.  Candidates have to be proposed and seconded by existing fellows, and the election has to be approved by the Council.

But in 2021 a new leadership team, headed by the novelist Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (who had once been Radio 4’s ‘poet in residence’) started to dismantle the rigorous election process and replace it with a social engineering project under which the ‘elitist’ notion of excellence would be abandoned and, in the words of Evaristo, the RSL would be transformed into ‘a Society open to all writers.’  The new process would be ‘fast-tracked’ 

by introducing an election procedure called ‘the Open Initiative’.  Under this the public would be asked ‘to nominate 60 fellows from diverse backgrounds, and the image of elitism shaken off by ‘the inclusion of people of colour, LGBTQ+ writers and the disabled’. Nominations would be submitted to a panel led by Evaristo (who had become president of the RSL in 2022) and Nagra.  This innovation, Evaristo explained, was designed to attract a broad range’ of writers from ‘different parts of the UK, from different communities, and a different demographic’.

Philip Hensher, a Fellow since 1998, disagreed with Evaristo’s basic assertion.  ‘The idea that the Society used to be a closed shop for the white middle classes until recently is false’, he said. And he pointed out that past and present fellows included Chinua Achebe, Nadeem Aslam, Tash Aw, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Shusaku Endo, Amitav Ghosh, Ved Mehta, RK Narayan, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith and Wole Soyinka, among many others.  VS Naipaul, who grew up in the Indian community of Trinidad, was made a Companion of Literature, the society’s highest honour, years before he had won the Nobel Prize.  Hensher recalled that Naipaul had first been elected to a fellowship in 1962, when he was only 30. 

Nonetheless, the ‘Open Initiative’ was initially supported by many Fellows who had been elected under the traditional procedure.  Efforts to diversify the fellowship had started in 2014 during the presidencies of Colin Thubron and Marina Warner, and in 2018 the RSL had introduced a scheme called ’40 Under 40’, in an attempt to recruit younger fellows. Had the leadership consulted the Fellowship about the Open Initiative, by summoning an EGM in 2022, they might even have gained majority approval for a change in the byelaws governing elections. But they failed to carry out any form of consultation and it quickly became evident that the scheme was being used to flood the Society with candidates whose only apparent qualification, in many cases, was that they matched the new ‘demographic’.   

Don Paterson, a holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, spoke for many in a succinct message to the Council. ‘ I’m writing this in good faith; I have no wish to see the RSL do anything but succeed… But it would help us all greatly if the Board would…explain how some (often indisputably talented) writers who have gained their fellowship… apparently managed this without “two works of outstanding literary merit”. One seems to have published a single poetry pamphlet’. He received no acknowledgment or reply.

Michael Longley denounced the new system and felt ‘very concerned about the scrapping of long-established procedures for electing new Fellows… The whole function and ethos of the RSL has been radically changed without a proper mandate from the Fellows.   Serious damage has been done. May I suggest that the RSL starts to staunch the wounds by calling an EGM ’, he wrote – to no effect.

On 2 April Richard Holmes and Dame Rose Tremain wrote to Nagra setting out their ‘dismay’ at ‘the changed election procedures (and) the high-handed sacking of Maggie Fergusson’ and requesting ‘an open response’ from the RSL. They received no acknowledgement or reply either. 

The Council’s failure to respond to the fellowships’ reaction brought to a head numerous concerns about the way in which the Society had been managed over the previous three years under the elusive, some would say furtive, chairmanship of Daljit Nagra.  And in March in an open letter to The Times, 69 fellows including Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hermione Lee and Salman Rushdie demanded an Extraordinary General Meeting.  There was no response, but during the row it had become clear that the Open Initiative candidates had been elected in breach of the Society’s governing byelaws.  Their elections were invalid. So in April a group of fellows, led by two ex-presidents, Colin Thubron and Marina Warner, referred the RSL to the Charity Commission, on numerous grounds of mismanagement and a failure to meet its legal obligations, and asked the Commission to enforce the demands for an EGM. 

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The long running battle to protect the Society that honoured and encouraged the best in new writing can be seen as a classic engagement in the culture wars, but it also raises questions about free speech and the critical role of literature in a world that obediently prioritises ‘EDI’ (equality, diversity and inclusion) over excellence.  

Many fellows have spoken of the ‘tremendous honour’ of being elected to an RSL fellowship, among them Philip Hensher and Victoria Glendinning. The latter described it as ‘an honour like no other… We are elected not by some faceless bureaucratic committee but by our fellow writers and professional peers. Fellowship means everything to me’. A recently elected fellow, Karin Altenberg, said ‘There is something wonderful about being elected by my peers and not… as part of any agenda – a sense of being included in that fellowship because of literary worth’.

The Society has traditionally been run on a basis of honour and integrity.  It has also, traditionally, been very short of money.  In the 1990’s it was forced to sell its library and archives to Cambridge University.  But the penury continued.  In 2019 the president in office, Dame Marina Warner, wrote to the fellowship, appealing for donations.  The letter mentioned the RSL’s ‘tight budget and small staff team’ and disclosed that despite a reduction in expenditure the society still needed ‘£20,000 to support its core costs’. This appeal had a remarkable effect because shortly afterwards the RSL received a grant of £1 million pounds from the ‘Hawthornden Literary Retreat’, a Drue Heinz Foundation. At almost the same time it acquired a new president and a new chair of Council.   The fresh team promptly set off on a spending spree.   

Staff numbers were increased, and the director’s empire grew. The RSL acquired a Head of Operations, and three separate managers – of Public Events, Engagements and Participation, and Marketing and Administration.  These innovations seem to have been expensive.  The accounts show that between January 2020 and December 2021 the RSL’s spending exceeded its income by over £250,000. In the most recent published accounts, for the 12 months ending in December 2023, the deficit totalled £322,000, meaning that the equivalent of half of the Hawthornden money already seems to have been spent.

The most noticeable innovation was the arrival of a ‘comms team’ under a ‘Director of Communications’, Catherine Riley.  Riley, being an experienced professional, promptly introduced a convoluted system under which free ‘communication’ became extremely difficult.  Press enquiries were shunted off to an outside PR agency, while Fellows were directed towards the ‘complaints button’ on the website. They were assured that if they used the button any queries they raised would be answered ‘within 8 weeks’.             

Two weeks after the dismissal of Fergusson, Catherine Riley contacted contributors to the cancelled edition of the Review with a soothing message. ‘It’s an exciting time of change for us’, she wrote. ‘We have been thinking of ways to engage with more Fellows in the creation of our magazine, and to update its design as part of the RSL’s brand refresh.  This work is ongoing, so we have decided to postpone the upcoming edition to the spring when we will also introduce… a roster of guest curators’.  

This letter did not have the intended effect. In further evidence of attempted censorship one contributor reported that the management had offered him ‘participation in an RSL event’ instead of publication of the tribute he had written.  And Riley’s letter to contributors was so misleading that Maggie Fergusson decided to circulate them herself, with a more accurate version of what had actually happened.  It was at this point that it all seems to have become too much for Daljit Nagra.  Backed by the president, Nagra accused Fergusson of ‘data breaches’ and then accused one of his own trustees’ of ‘sharing confidential information’.  He issued a message headed ‘Cease and Desist’, a legal threat designed to close down further criticism. Under this level of pressure the council of the RSL split into factions.  A minority of trustees began to feel seriously intimidated and one resigned in consequence.

Continuing the attack early in February, Riley issued a statement saying that Maggie Fergusson had never been fired because she had known for a year that she would be leaving in December.  Fergusson was outraged. Her response was to produce convincing evidence that it could not be true.  It included an email correspondence that contradicted the RSL’s claim.  And when she asked why, if it was true, it had taken the directorate nearly two months to mention it, she received no reply. Instead the Society’s PR agents told two national newspapers that in claiming to have been sacked Fergusson was acting ‘dishonestly’.  Months later Daljit Nagra, when challenged, described this defamatory statement as ‘an awful misjudgement’, but he has steadily declined to withdraw or apologise for it.

 As the complaints continued to flood in the PR agency hired by the RSL announced that the Society had referred itself to the Charity Commission, since its staff were being harassed by ‘a sustained campaign of misinformation against it’, and Evaristo decided to defend her policy in a series of newspaper interviews, notably with the Guardian. The organisation ‘needed to change’, she said. It should no longer be prejudiced towards writers who live in London, ‘who are white and middle class.  No single group within the fellowship should feel they own it’. 

This justification proved too much for Michael Longley, who lives in Dublin:  ‘I have always considered it a great honour to be a Fellow of the RSL’, he responded. ‘ I believe I was elected because of the several collections of poetry I had then published, and that my being white, middle-aged and middle-class had nothing to do with it.  I have harassed no one, made no claims on ‘ownership’ of the Society, and been completely unaware of any ‘campaign’.  These allegations are quite uncalled for.’

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It was Trevor Phillips, when chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who pointed out that in the context of the culture wars ‘equality’ usually means ‘control’, and the suppression of free speech.  

And the right to free speech has twice been threatened by the current leadership of the RSL.  In 2021, during Marina Warner’s presidency, the children’s’ author Kate Clanchy FRSL, became the target of a twitter mob who were attacking her memoir of teaching English to teenagers, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.  Clanchy had been accused of racism, and of stereotyping her former pupils.  The students in question supported her, and praised everything she had done for them, and Clanchy apologised and re-edited the book, which had won the Orwell Prize. But as the Twitter attacks grew the book was pulped, and she lost her publisher, her agent and her livelihood. 

Troubled by this Warner and Philip Pullman proposed that the RSL should hold a public event to discuss the effects of social media on writers and their work. But Nagra, then the newly appointed chairman, and Rosenberg refused permission. Nor would they issue any statement in support of Clanchy, who was being vilely abused by her foul-mouthed accusers. 

In the following year, when Sir Salman Rushdie was the victim of a knife attack in New York, Warner wanted the Society to issue a statement in support of his freedom of speech, but she was again overruled by Nagra, this time supported by the new president Bernardine Evaristo, who said that such a move ‘might give offence’. Daljit Nagra subsequently claimed that the RSL had supported Rushdie, but this support turned out to be a note in the Review where he wrote that he was ‘deeply saddened’ by the attack, adding the rather superfluous comment that the RSL ‘did not condone violence towards authors on the grounds of their views’.  Nagra then added a more revealing qualification: ‘Free speech is of course a complicated issue that is bound by a series of responsibilities.’ (Nagra has said privately that he had been opposed to any public statement in support of Rushdie’s freedom of speech because a member of his family had been deeply offended by Midnight’s Children).

The treatment of Kate Clanchy was arguably the biggest blot on the record of the current management of the RSL.  The leader of the twitter mob was Professor ‘Sunny’ Singh of London Metropolitan University.  She describes herself on her university’s website as ‘a pre-eminent decolonising public intellectual and novelist’, although many people may not have heard of her.  In 2020 she twittered: ‘I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say No. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.’

Singh has apparently been described as ‘a globally acclaimed, critically renowned novelist and internationally reputed academic of the arts and social sciences’.  Furthermore ‘her professional output transcends academia and extends into public discourse and advocacy’. 

It was presumably in this last role, of public advocate, that she persecuted Kate Clanchy. When a newspaper report mentioned that Clanchy’s mother had died of Covid, alone, in a care home, Singh took the opportunity to mock the author’s grief.  

“Thinking of running a competition to describe the weepy lady writer and her ineffectual white knight (a reference to Sir Philip Pullman). How would you describe them?”, she tweeted.  When her students offered a selection of sexual remarks and analogies to vomit and cheese the ‘public intellectual’ responded with ‘Yowzah!’ and emojis of applause.  

Clanchy resigned from the RSL in 2023, and in her (unpublished) resignation letter she wrote: ‘I used to tell my students in the school library to write their feelings as honestly as they could and so be guided to their thoughts. I told them that was how excellent writing was attained, through truthfulness and integrity of mind. I told them not to be afraid’.    She added: ‘I thank the society very much for my years of fellowship but now that … the RSL has honoured someone who had publicly jeered at my grief, who I felt had spat on my mother’s grave… I would lack integrity if I continued in fellowship’.

Kate Clanchy received no acknowledgement or reply to that letter, but Rosenberg circulated it to the trustees with a request that they should give it no publicity. Meanwhile, almost unbelievably, Singh, a wealthy former novelist who has no literary books in print, has been bundled into a Fellowship under the Open Initiative

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Early in the year the beleaguered trustees of the RSL decided to commission an independent governance review from the National Council of Voluntary Organisations. At the time of writing the NCVO’s report, like the final ruling of the Charity Commission on the necessity of an EGM, is still awaited.

Meanwhile the triumvirate continue to swing their wrecking ball.  The interventions of Molly Rosenberg have been increasingly destructive. The postponement of the Review was not her first attempt to censor the work of Fellows.  In 2020 she removed from an obituary of Jan Morris all mention of the fact that Morris had started life as ‘James’. The article had been written by Morris’s long-standing friend, and literary agent, Derek Johns.  But every mention of ‘James’ had to be removed until Rosenberg – who claimed that Morris had ‘not been a good ambassador for the trans community’ – would approve publication. In another farcical intervention she objected to a reference to the benefactor of the Ondaatje Prize, Sir Christopher Ondaatje, as ‘a great traveller’ – which he was – on the grounds that this might offend ‘the travelling community’. 

And in 2021 she interfered with the publication of the retiring president’s Farewell Address. In her final speech Marina Warner had compared attacks on Twitter to the barbaric institution of the pillory and mentioned that ‘several writers are among those who have suffered this terrible punishment’. Warner also noted that whereas courageous 18^th century publishers had sometimes been among the victims, ‘today the same spirit has been curbed by fear of being pilloried on social media’.  This passage apparently displeased Rosenberg who may have taken it as a reference to her own refusal to support Kate Clanchy. She could not change the president’s text, so she changed its title – from ‘A Farewell Address’ to ‘A Personal Note’.

The director’s attempts to remove the comments about ‘the Israeli war machine’ from the Review continued into January, but as the situation slipped beyond her control, she was forced to publish the entire article when the redesigned Review appeared in the spring. However there was no sign of the promised ‘guest curator’ – the original excuse for Fergusson’s dismissal. Instead editing was by an anonymous ‘RSL team’, which presumably meant Rosenberg and Catherine Riley. The ‘brand-refresh’ featured ‘an Illustrator in Residence’, a hideous cover, and 140 photographs of its contributors – including a full-page colour study of the president.  It was described in the TLS as ‘a fatuous revamp’.     

As the year went by the director dropped out of public view, leading one vice-president to write, ‘I’m struck by how all along Molly, who has done more than anyone to create this mess, has never herself answered a single question or complaint’.

The president, meanwhile, goes from strength to strength. In retrospect it is possible to see that Evaristo’s use of her presidency was entirely predictable from the time of her appointment.  She has been a crusader for Black Women’s writing since she left Eltham Grammar School for Girls in 1977.  But her reductionist habit of classifying writers by their colour, age, gender, class and place of residence can be misleading. She herself was born and brought up in a leafy suburb of Greenwich, where her mother was a schoolteacher. The novelist Paul Bailey FRSL, who died last month, was – it is true – white, old and male and he was also born in South London.  But it was in Southwark – where his mother worked as a cleaner and his father as a road sweeper.

Evaristo is a formidable cultural operator, as her notice in Wikipedia confirms. (At the last count there were 43 entries under ‘Awards and Recognition’).  She must have been furious when Rosenberg’s clumsy attempts to relaunch the Review triggered an almighty row and placed the smooth operation of her project in jeopardy.  But she kept her head and as the dispute heated up she gradually faded out of the public picture. She slipped away from the AGM of 2023 when two Fellows started to question the RSL’s failure to defend Salman Rushdie.  She has avoided direct engagement with the fellowship since her unfortunate reference to the need for ‘impartiality’ after the stabbing of Rushdie was ridiculed. (Rushdie had tweeted, ‘Just wondering if the RSL is “impartial” about attempted murder?). And she recently claimed that as president she was merely a figurehead and had nothing to do with the implementation of policy. (In fact the president is ex officio a member of Council, and the current policy was devised and launched by her).  

But she remains a highly visible presence in the RSL’s internal publicity material. The November Newsletter, headed once again by a photograph of the president, advertised a forthcoming event, when ‘the Booker Prize-winning legend that is Bernardine Evaristo revisits ‘Mr Loverman’ her beloved 2013 novel which has lately been adapted to brilliant effect on the BBC’.  So the presidency has its uses, even for ‘a figurehead’.  

Finally there is Daljit Nagra who more than anyone has been responsible for the RSL’s failure to address the unhappiness of the Fellows.  Under his leadership there has been a pattern of threats, silence, evasion and deceit. It is the chairman who was responsible for allowing the situation to spiral out of control as disquiet spread among the Fellowship and allegations mounted up.  Instead of dealing with the threat to the good name of the RSL he wrote a message headed ‘Cease and Desist’ which was taken as a legal threat to deter further criticism.

In the summer he called a series of ‘consultations’ which he said would enable the Council to understand the demands of Fellows or an EGM.  Those meetings led to nothing, and an undertaking he gave to circulate the minutes of each meeting was broken.

Nagra (who had only been elected to a fellowship in 2017) became chairman of the council in 2021 and is due to retire at the end of the year. Interviewed by the Review on his appointment he betrayed a curious reaction. ‘ROYAL…SOCIETY…LITERATURE… You could not get more intimidating in three words, could you?’, he said. It would be interesting to know why he found this new distinction so intimidating.  His published biography confirms that he was already an experienced literary politician who had judged numerous British literary prizes. (Although he omitted his unexpectedly brief association with the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize of Canada). 

Literature never has been and never will be for everyone, as Richard Holmes emphasised in a letter to Bernardine Evaristo. ‘You quite rightly say that “writing is for everyone”.  But this cannot be said to mean that really good writing can be done by everyone.  This is simply not the case’.  The work of the 69 writers who signed the open letter printed in The Times is read by, or taught to, millions of readers all over the world every day, yet the trio who have taken over the RLS have the arrogance to condemn it as ‘elitist’ or ‘exclusive’.  

Referring to the RSL’s treatment of Rushdie and Clanchy, Hadley Freeman, in the Sunday Times, wrote: ‘When a literary society is more interested in the diversity of its writers than the quality of their writing and is more worried about causing offence than the physical safety of novelists, it has ceased to have any reason to exist.’   

[An edited version of this article appeared in Prospect Magazine in December 2024]

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