Welcome to The Fat Review
In the year 2020, I, Sangeetha Thanapal, writer, editor and content creator, wanted to make a sustained effort to read books written by people like me, and for people like me.
I specifically set aside money and effort to search for and find novels of genres I love (fantasy, romance, literary fiction etc.,) that are written by Brown and Black men, women and gender non-conforming people.
The reasons behind this are quite simple:
- I wanted to see myself represented and;
- I wanted to spend money on people who are doing this hard work of writing about us.
The publishing industry is overwhelmingly white and female. By putting my money (and therefore, support) behind Brown & Black authors, I was doing my part is disrupting this normalcy.
But something else kept happening. While many of the work I was reading was making me feel represented in terms of race and perhaps even gender, over and over and over again, plus-sized and fat Brown & Black people were nowhere to be seen.
This is a deliberate act of erasure. We exist. There’s so many of us that to write us out of your world is something that is done purposefully. To refuse to write about fat people as normal and existing in the world is already an act of fatphobia.
