Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker prize-winning novelist, is heading a major project to republish books by black British writers that generally disappeared without trace before they could receive the recognition they deserved.

The author of Girl, Woman, Other has curated “Black Britain, Writing Back”, a series that launches in February, with six initial titles ranging from literary thrillers to historical fiction. Evaristo said she is seeking “to correct historic bias in British publishing and bring a wealth of lost writing back into circulation”.

She told the Observer that a change in climate has brought “more of an appetite” for what black British writers have to say, with greater interest in black British history than ever before. “There is more awareness that there are stories out there from all kinds of communities that are definitely worth engaging with. I wanted to bring back into the light and into circulation books that I think are really important, powerful books. One of the things we’ve had against us as black British writers is that people haven’t been that interested in our stories.”

In 2019, Evaristo won the Booker – jointly with Margaret Atwood – for Girl, Woman, Other, her acclaimed novel about 12 characters in contemporary Britain, the majority of them black and female.

Last summer she was among authors – including Benjamin Zephaniah and Malorie Blackman – who joined the Black Writers’ Guild in calling for the publishing industry to address inequalities in output and staff.

Evaristo said that there has been interest in books by African American writers and African writers, but less so in black British writers until recently: “That’s why we have the Black Writers’ Guild, because there has been a reluctance on the part of the industry to publish our work. So that’s starting to change now.”

She said the lack of black British authors was not down to “latent racism”, rather a range of other factors. “How do books reach a wider audience?” she said. “Marketing is one of those things. I don’t know whether those books were well marketed. Perhaps not.”

Literary festivals, she said, had traditionally not been receptive to black British authors. “It is shocking. I could tell you some stories, but I won’t. I don’t want to call out any organisations. But the fact is that a lot of the black British writers who’ve come up over the decades haven’t been invited to the big festivals, which is one of the big platforms for writers to showcase their work.”

The six initial titles are Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings, a story of mental health; SI Martin’s Incomparable World, a reimagining of 1780s London with African-American soldiers; CLR James’s Minty Alley, a social realist novel; Nicola Williams’s Without Prejudice, a legal thriller; Judith Bryan’s Bernard and the Cloth Monkey, a family psychodrama; and Mike Phillips’s The Dancing Face, a thriller.

The series publisher, Hamish Hamilton at Penguin Random House, described the project as a “landmark” publication of “lost or hard-to-find books, now rediscovered, by black writers who wrote about Black Britain and the diaspora across the last century”.

Williams drew on her real-life career as a criminal law barrister in writing Without Prejudice. She recalled that there was “some interest” at its publication in 1997, “but not as much as I would have liked”, denting her confidence.

She said: “Writing is hard and then there was a sense that black writing is very niche, that only black people would read black writers and, amazingly, there were some people who thought black people didn’t read – instead of being [seen as] universal stories that just happened to be written by black writers. That is a shift that has been a while in coming. When you set it against the context of everything that’s happened this year, in terms of race, then it has greater urgency… Timing is everything, really.”

Returning to bookshelves

Jacqueline Roy: Born in London to a black Jamaican father and white British mother, Roy spent time, in her teenage years, in a psychiatric hospital and her novel, The Fat Lady Sings, is inspired by her experience. She became a lecturer in English, specialising in black writing, at Manchester Metropolitan University.

SI Martin: Born in Bedford, Martin is a museums consultant and author, specialising in Black British history and literature. He has written several books of historical fiction and non-fiction for teenage and adult readers, and founded a series of narrative London walks entitled “500 Years of Black London”.

Nicola Williams: Williams was a barrister specialising in criminal law, including three successful Commonwealth death penalty appeals before the House of Lords as the Privy Council. She was a BBC World legal expert on the OJ Simpson trial verdict and a member of the first Independent Advisory Group to the Metropolitan Police.