The Bee is a literary magazine, an online platform, a podcast, and the heart of a writing community. Our mission is to nurture, publish and promote the best new working-class writing by new and established working-class writers and visual artists.
We strongly believe that there is a need to discuss contemporary social class more openly, and that writers can voice to class experience in ways social science cannot.
To understand what we mean by working class, and why a magazine of working-writing is needed, read Dave O’Brien’s essay Publishing’s Class Problem.
Dave O’Brien
Team
Publisher: Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive New Writing North
Editor: Richard Benson
Art Director: David Rainbird
The Bee Magazine
The Bee magazine will be published twice a year, the first issue being in autumn 2025. It will contain short fiction, extracts, non-fiction, poetry and art. We seek work about contemporary working class life and culture. Our writers are new, emerging and established, and most are from working-class backgrounds. In each issue we look to share a mix of stories and poems that provide moments of delight, provocation and warm recognition of shared experiences in modern Britain.
We are open to submissions, and we read and consider all the work we receive within our guidelines. Our editor then works with writers to prepare their pieces for publication. We pay all the writers we publish.
For more information on submitting to the Bee, please see our Submission Guidelines.
The Bee site
On the Bee site, and in our social media channels, we share fiction, photography, interviewsand non-fiction about contemporary working-class culture, politics. We also host our podcast, The Working Class Library.
We have open submissions on set themes several times through the year, and we let you know about these on the site, on our social media and in our monthly newsletter (add link).
The Beehive
The Beehive is our writer-nurturing programme. We run writers groups for working-class writers in workplaces and local communities, and in summer 2025 we will launch an online writing community that offers opportunities for development, access to advice from established writers, and chances for writers to discuss their own work, and books in general.
The Working-Class Library
The Working Class Library is the Bee’s podcast. Each month Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, and Claire Malcolm, our publisher and CEO of New Writing North, invite a writer to discuss a book and decide whether it deserves a place on the shelves of the Working Class Library – our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people.
We aim to celebrate both well-known and overlooked works of British literature, many of whose working-class origins are hidden in plain sight.
A Writing Chance
The Bee grew out of A Writing Chance, a programme co-founded in 2021 by the actor Michael Sheen, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, New Writing North and Northumbria University. A Writing Chance opens access to the writing industries for new writers from working-class and lower-income backgrounds.
A Writing Chance 2024–25 is produced by New Writing North in partnership with Faber & Faber, the Daily Mirror and Substack, with funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Mab Gwalia – Michael Sheen’s charitable fund – and Arts Council England, and with support from audio sponsor Audible. The programme is supported by research from Northumbria University and Bath Spa University, funded by AHRC.
A Writing Chance is needed because the writing industries increasingly favour people from more privileged backgrounds. We believe that all talented writers should be able to access opportunities to develop their work, regardless of their background. We all benefit from reading a wider range of voices in our national media and culture.
The original Bee
We took our name because the beehive is easily understood as a model of cooperation in which every member of the community contributes, is recognised and is able to progress. But we are also inspured by the previous literary magazine called The Bee, founded in October 1759 by Oliver Goldsmith, a writer who showed great sympathy with dispossessed and downtrodden. In the Bee, which lasted only until November 1759, Oliver sought to published “essays on the most interesting subjects”. We hope to continue his good work.
