The Bee challenges the assumption that working-class Britain is a nation of non-readers – revealing a thriving reading culture that often happens beyond the places the publishing industry traditionally looks.
As Britain battles a national decline in reading, The Bee is challenging one of the assumptions at the heart of the debate: that working-class people simply don’t read.
The literary magazine, published by New Writing North, argues that millions of working-class readers risk being overlooked because their reading habits do not always fit the conventional picture of book culture.
They are reading library books and second-hand novels, swapping books, listening to audiobooks and consuming manga and comics online – a reading culture that can be far less visible to publishers, researchers and the media.
Its new special edition, Celebrating the Working-Class Bookworm in the National Year of Reading, distributed with The Bookseller on 2 October, sets out to make those readers visible.
The issue brings together reportage, fiction, essays and discussion exploring who reads, what they read and why it matters – challenging the enduring idea that reading is predominantly a middle-class pursuit.
Research commissioned by New Writing North in 2025 found that 63% of working-class readers said representation was important to them and that they wanted to see more people like themselves on the page. Yet fewer than 20% of people working in publishing come from working-class backgrounds.
Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, said: “For generations, books have offered working-class readers something extraordinarily powerful – an affordable way to escape immediate circumstances, encounter different worlds, make sense of lived experience and imagine different futures.
“Yet public debate around reading increasingly presents class through a deficit lens – focusing on the people who do not read, rather than the millions who do.”
Only half of UK adults regularly read for pleasure, according to research by The Reading Agency, while reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to historically low levels – helping prompt 2026’s National Year of Reading.
Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive of New Writing North and publisher of The Bee, said: “We talk a great deal about Britain’s reading crisis, and rightly so. But we also need to ask who publishing imagines when it pictures a reader.
“There are millions of people from working-class backgrounds for whom reading already means escape, pleasure, companionship and discovery, yet they are still under-represented both on the page and inside the industry. If we want more people to read, we have to make more people feel that books belong to them.”
In 2026, the Star Academies Trust published a government-backed inquiry into white working-class educational outcomes and found 36% of white students who received free school meals got a grade 4 or above in English, compared with 72% for all pupils who did not receive school meals.
Richard Benson said: “There are serious problems around poverty, literacy and access to education, and nobody should minimise them. But poverty, disadvantage and class are too often collapsed into one another, creating a misleading picture of a uniformly non-reading working class.”
The Bee’s own definition of working class broadly follows the Office for National Statistics approach, based principally on parental occupation when a person was 14.
For the special edition, Benson travelled through Yorkshire talking to working-class readers about what they read, why they read and where they get their books.
Among them is 16-year-old Kieran Hazzard from Hull, who learned to read through regular trips to the library and then helped teach his mother to read. Today he reads fantasy, non-fiction and manga, much of it accessed digitally because manga series can be expensive.
Kieran is one of four sixth-form boys featured in the magazine whose reading ranges from Diary of a Wimpy Kid and manga to Stephen King, George Orwell and Sylvia Plath.
Jake Palmer, 16, described how Plath’s poetry helped him through the breakdown of a friendship. He told The Bee: “It kept me going. Poetry keeps me going. Reading keeps me going.”
One of the teenagers describes his local bookshop as somewhere he would be devastated to lose; another calls a bookshop his “second home”.
Benson said: “We talk about young working-class boys so often in terms of failure, poor attainment or antisocial behaviour. What we hear much less about are boys like Jake and Kieran: reading poetry, writing their own work, spending time in bookshops and using books to make sense of their lives. If we only ever look for deficit, that is all we will see.”
The magazine also explores an informal reading culture that can be almost invisible to the publishing industry – through charity shops, second-hand sellers, supermarket book-swap tables, audiobooks, borrowed books and online comics and manga.
It meets 85-year-old Maureen Thomson, who has read throughout a working life spent in guest houses, factories and on the land, and now swaps historical romances with friends and through a supermarket book exchange.
For Maureen, those novels connect strongly with the lives of her mother and grandmother, who worked in domestic service; women whose experiences rarely entered conventional histories.
Benson said: “We need to be careful not to dismiss romance, comics, audiobooks, second-hand books or books passed from hand to hand simply because they sit outside the parts of reading culture the publishing industry finds easiest to see or value.”
The debate has recently been given fresh prominence by Booker Prize winner and 2026-shortlisted author Douglas Stuart, who has challenged the idea that books are a middle-class pastime.
“The most loyal patrons of libraries and the most voracious, insightful readers I know are the women I grew up with,” he has said, adding that one of his proudest moments was seeing Shuggie Bain reach the top of the discount supermarket charts.
Benson added: “We are not saying there isn’t a reading crisis. We are saying you cannot understand it properly if you misunderstand who reads. Working-class Britain does read – in libraries, on buses, in bedrooms and factories. It reads romances and comics, audiobooks and poetry. It borrows, swaps, lends and buys second-hand. Perhaps some of the people we keep describing as non-readers have simply been reading somewhere we weren’t looking.”
The Bee is a new home for working-class writing. It has grown out of the work of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance, and aims to continue platforming, supporting, and celebrating working-class writers from the UK and beyond.
The Bee comprises a website, a literary magazine, The Working Class Library podcast, and The Beehive, an online space which provides support, community, and development opportunities for new and emerging working-class writers.
