BBC criticised over 'sneering' book night

The BBC has been criticised for its "sneering coverage" of genre fiction during last month's World Book Night programmes on BBC Two.

A group of authors has sent a letter to BBC director general Mark Thompson complaining about the portrayal of commercial fiction in The Books We Really Read: A Culture Show Special and New Novelists: 12 Of The Best, both aired on March 5.

Signatories include leading science fiction writer Iain Banks, Gold Dagger-nominated crime author SJ Bolton and celebrated children's fiction scribe Debi Gliori.

Fantasy author Stephen Hunt, who organised the petition, said that the "sneering tone" levelled at genre fiction during the programmes was "deeply counterproductive to the night's aims of actually encouraging people to read novels".

He said that bias shown towards a single sub-genre of literary fiction was "unbalanced and unrepresentative of all but a small fraction of the country's reading tastes".

"Closest to my own heart, the failure to feature a single work from the three genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction was a disgrace," said Hunt.

"The official World Book Night list included Philip Pullman's fantasy novel Northern Lights. It is a shame the BBC could not."

He added: "There have been weeks when one in three books sold in the UK were Harry Potter novels, or more recently, Twilight novels.

"The sweeping under the carpet of the very genres of the imagination which engage and fire readers' minds shows a lot more about the BBC production team's taste in fiction than it does about what the general public is actually reading."

Hunt called on the BBC to produce a literary version of Film 2011, or commission a modern take on the Bookworm show presented by Griff Rhys Jones in the 1990s.

By airing such a programme in primetime, according to Hunt, the corporation would "do what it said on the tin the first time around: cover the books we really read".