Tobi Coventry is invisible, yet he is here. A debut novelist writing about sexuality, desire and, inadvertently, masculinity: the kind of man, we’ve been told for the past five years, no longer exists. Or at least could not win the Booker Prize without causing a strange cultural shudder. He spends his days reading for a living, scouting books before they surface, digging through the backlist to find stories that might translate to screens. So when the book scout-turned-author read The Guardian’s view of the Booker – literary fiction “closed to men”, books about young men “hard to find”, David Szalay’s win putting “masculinity back at the centre of literary fiction” – he wondered, simply: what?
“Some of the best new books come from men and some of them come from women, and I’ve never sat there and thought, ‘God, I’m really waiting for a book from a man to come along,’” Coventry says from his home office in Rye. Behind him are bookshelves filled with works from authors of all genders.
