Economic commentators and political pundits may increasingly dominate our airwaves, but popular novels provide a much better insight into the issues facing society, experts said yesterday.
Bestsellers such as Brick Lane and The Kite Runner should be taken just as seriously as academic works when discussing poverty and international matters, the researchers from the University of Manchester and the London School of Economics claim.
The team scoured the pages of a number of much-loved novels to come up with their Fiction of Development report.
Monica Ali's bestseller Brick Lane was said to have "contributed to wider public understandings of global developments in ways that no academic writing ever has" in its depiction of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to London's Tower Hamlets area.
This year's Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, was praised for its "passionate depiction of the perils and pitfalls of rampant capitalism in contemporary India".
And according to the report, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner "has arguably done more to educate Western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan under the Taliban and thereafter than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research".
Dr Dennis Rodgers, from the University of Manchester, said: "Despite the regular flow of academic studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably novelists who do as good a job - if not a better one - of representing and communicating the realities of international development.
He added: "Fiction does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article