Including immigrant and ethnic minority writers: a comparison of different European contexts

Writers of immigrant origin, such as Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureshi, have become an integral part of British literature to such an extent that they have almost come to represent this literature in a global context. While immigrant and ethnic minority writers have certainly not reached this stage in other European countries, they have clearly become more visible over the last three decades in many of these. My paper aims to identify the factors that explain the differences in the emergence and success of immigrant and ethnic minority writers in different European countries. Of course, the differences in the emergence of these writers are linked to immigration histories. Support structures in the receiving contexts, such as specific cultural policies or individual actors and bottom-up initiatives have also played a major role in this process. But their success also strongly depends on ideologies governing the actors and institutions involved in the process of their recognition, including not only prize juries, but also universities, amongst others.