I Write Feminist Fiction, Not Romance
and why that matters
I never set out to write happily-ever-afters. Even in my earlier years reading, I chose books that challenged me — stories that left a mark rather than a pleasant afterglow.
Over time that preference turned into frustration. Too many sharp, capable heroines are still relegated to the role of satellite, revolving around a love interest as if romance were their primary reason for existing. Affection is part of life, but it cannot be the whole plot for half the population. Women’s realities are legislated, surveilled, commodified, and contested; reducing those pressures to a single question of “Will they or won’t they?” is an erasure packaged as entertainment.
Love stories are not the problem. The monopoly is. A quick look at bestseller lists shows plenty of female-led novels sold almost entirely on “slow-burn chemistry,” while male characters are allowed quests, wars, and philosophical crises.
Where are the mainstream titles about women who negotiate peace treaties, dismantle empires, or channel righteous anger into systemic change?
That gap drives my work. Feminist, politically engaged fiction is not a niche; it’s a corrective lens. These narratives centre women’s autonomy instead of their availability, their insurgency instead of their infatuation. They remind readers that policy and power shape our lives far more than Cupid’s arrow — and that sometimes the most urgent love story is the one a woman writes with her own future.
Feminism Isn’t a Subplot
Feminist and explicitly political fiction is too often shelved as a “special interest,” as though a woman’s struggle for bodily autonomy were a quirky hobby rather than a daily negotiation with power. But for many of us, the border between the personal and the political is tissue-thin; survival itself is a political act, waged in classrooms, clinics, courtrooms, and kitchens. We read to inhabit other lives, yes, but also to see our own unspoken battles named with clarity and rage. That is why the narratives that linger for me are those in which women refuse polite silence — stories where heroines bruise the sky with their voices, where their imperfections are not tidied away but examined like evidence at the scene of a cultural crime.
Consider Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. When it debuted, critics dismissed it as dystopian melodrama, too far-fetched for modern democracies.
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia [...] As a dystopia, this is a thinly textured one. [...] But if Offred is a sappy stand-in for Winston Smith, and Gilead seems at times to be only a colouring book version of Oceania, it may be because Atwood means to do more than scare us about the obvious consequences of a Falwellian coup d’état.”
- Alix Madrigal, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Offred’s monotonous manner of expression just drones and drones.”
- Robert Linkous, San Francisco Review of Books (a man, ugh)
“This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare.”
- Mary McCarthy, The New York Times
Four decades later, its red cloaks march in real-world protests and its once-imaginary decrees echo in courtroom rulings.
Atwood wasn’t forecasting; she was documenting the logical endgame of centuries-old patriarchal ambitions. Books like hers function as early-warning systems: textual seismographs that record the ideological tremors beneath our feet.
To encounter such fiction is to hold a mirror up to the present, then watch that mirror crack. Each fracture line reveals another overlooked truth: that a society’s treatment of its women is never background scenery — it is the plot itself, and we are already living inside it.
Violence, Power, and Truth
If The Handmaid’s Tale sounds the alarm, R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War answers it with artillery fire. Few contemporary novels are so unapologetically political while placing a furious, flesh-and-blood woman at the epicentre of empire and catastrophe. Rin — peasant, prodigy, war criminal — exists to remind us that female protagonists need not be lovable to be unforgettable. In fact, Kuang refuses to sand her down for anyone’s comfort. The result is a heroine who is angry, ravenous for power, strategic to the point of monstrosity, and yet heartbreakingly human.
R. F. Kuang’s protagonist Rin receives the kind of criticism that rarely sticks to comparable male characters: “too abrasive,” “unlikable,” “morally bankrupt.” The discomfort is telling. Many readers are unaccustomed to watching a young woman take command of an army — mud-spattered, drug-addicted, and frighteningly effective — without the usual offsets of seduction or glamour. Rin is not a femme fatale; she is a field general, and that violates an unwritten rule about how female power should look.
Kuang is hardly alone. N. K. Jemisin’s Essun (The Broken Earth), Shelley Parker-Chan’s Zhu (She Who Became the Sun), and Kameron Hurley’s Nyx (God’s War) all push past the old constraints. These characters wield ambition, vengeance, and strategic coldness without being filtered through erotic cliché. Their stories expand the range of female motivation instead of flattening it into purity on one side, seduction on the other.
The goal is not to crown a new roster of “female villains.” It is to break the likability corset that has cinched heroines for generations. History shows that women have always been capable of raw, inconvenient power; contemporary fiction should reflect that reality. In my forthcoming novel, The Hunger of Her, I follow the same path. Rage is not a flaw to be corrected — it is the narrative engine that topples regimes and rewrites myth.
Until female characters are allowed the same moral volatility as their male counterparts, the literary canon hasn’t truly grown; it has only rearranged the furniture inside the same narrow room.
Writing The Hunger of Her
In my forthcoming novel The Hunger of Her, I pull together the themes I’ve been tracking in contemporary feminist fiction and anchor them in a near-future London — close enough to today that the political echoes are unmistakable. The city is run by a government that openly curtails women’s rights; female autonomy has been pared down to a legal afterthought. Against that backdrop I combine two tools I return to again and again: dry, observational humour and deliberately unsettling body horror.
The book’s central conceit is a literalisation of female “appetite.” Women who refuse to starve — physically, intellectually, or politically — undergo an outlawed transformation and become “Feeders,” a concept loosely inspired by the cannibalistic ghouls in Tokyo Ghoul.
Their existence asks a blunt question: what happens when the hunger society keeps trying to shrink finally fights back?
My protagonist is designed to test that question. She is an anti-heroine, strategic, ruthless, sometimes monstrous, and her rage drives the plot rather than derailing it. The novel uses her arc to show how hunger can stand in for ambition, resistance, or even hope. Though the premise is speculative, most of the social climate requires little invention; I am simply extending current rhetoric and policy trends by a few legislative steps. The horror lies less in the gore than in how plausible the scenario feels.
My goal is straightforward: to deliver a story where a woman’s fury isn’t pathologised or sexualised but treated as a valid response to systemic oppression. I want a heroine who is allowed the full range of human complexity; someone prepared to rebuild the world on her terms or burn it down if rebuilding proves impossible.
“Since the first Restriction Law came into place, London has tightened like a belt. Once bloated with drunken men and swearing girls, it now creaks under the weight of surveillance and lipstick-stained muzzles.”
- E.L. Black, The Hunger of Her (WIP)
I don’t write speculative fiction to provide a getaway; I write it to confront reality head-on. If readers feel uneasy, that means the book has done its work by forcing them to ask why they are uncomfortable. My focus — across my published titles and every work-in-progress — is unapologetically political and openly feminist.
That commitment drives The Hunger of Her. Set in a near-future London run by an overtly patriarchal government, the novel follows a female anti-hero who dismantles that power structure by any means necessary. The project isn’t about romance or escapism. It’s about examining how quickly today’s rhetoric can become tomorrow’s law, and what resistance might look like when survival is on the line.
I’m determined to finish this manuscript because I believe stories that map power, anger and systemic inequality are urgent. Readers don’t need more narratives in which women find fulfilment only through love. They need stories where women seize control, challenge authoritarianism, and redraw the limits of what is possible. That’s the story I intend to deliver.