My candidate statement in full, with voting open until Wednesday 22 October
Hello! Fellow members of the Society of Authors (SoA) might have spotted me in your management committee election pack last week. Either way, I’m sharing my campaign statement in the hope that it’ll resonate with you…
For context, every year, the SoA has three openings on its management committee. They invite members to nominate prospective candidates, and if more than three candidates emerge, an election is triggered.
And I realise that very few of you might be members of the SoA. However, I’m sharing my candidate statement here as an overall mission statement. It’d be ace if you could please share this with potential SoA members.
One of my aims is to increase SoA membership generally. A larger membership means better diversity, more voices, a wider range of needs, and a stronger union overall. Anyways, I won’t waffle — my statement is below.
My candidate statement in full
I’m a poet, award-winning lyricist, educator, and activist from Wakefield. Ever since I began writing and performing poetry in 2006, I’ve been politically minded and have become attached to various social and humanitarian causes. I’ve now been a full-time poet for 10 years and have a wide range of experience in the industry. I joined the SoA in 2021, having previously been a member of Equity since 2014.
As a working-class poet who was recently diagnosed with ADHD, I’ve spent most of the past decade accepting things as they are and being grateful for whatever I’m offered. At best, authors’ pay has frozen during this time. In many cases, it’s declined, coinciding with the severely reduced likelihood of receiving public funding. Now, at 36, I’ve found the confidence to start advocating for myself, and I want to step into a role that will allow me to support as many other authors as possible.
I’m determined to campaign for authors at all stages of their careers to be paid properly and treated with the value and respect that they deserve. The rise of AI is petrifying for all of you, particularly when some leading literary festivals and publishers appear to be embracing rather than shunning it. With this sudden and grave threat, your value as emerging, post-emerging, or established authors should be higher than ever. Despite this, you’re increasingly being cast aside in favour of celebrity authors with no prior background in writing.
I’m also passionate about campaigning for both vocal and practical expressions of Palestinian solidarity. As workers within the literary industry, we can use our collective power to push arts institutions to end their complicity with the ongoing genocide. With freedom of expression under threat, publicly opposing the heartbreaking scenes in the Middle East as a professional author is not without risk. I would work to strengthen the protection of freedom of speech and expression so that authors can safely continue to speak out against global injustices.
Alongside being an author in my own right, I’ve also regularly produced live poetry events around the UK since 2014. Providing platforms for a diverse range of voices and creating opportunities to aid writer development has always been at the forefront of my practice. I want to channel this energy into a more formalised and structured role.
I have nearly 20 years of experience in digital marketing. This has included paid roles as well as promoting myself, my band, my spoken word record label, and latterly, LIVEwire Poetry. I also fronted a poetry fundraiser for Write Out Loud in 2021/22 and would draw on this experience to help SoA membership reach its full potential. There are thousands of writers in the UK who are not members of the SoA and I intend to use my experience to grow the membership of your union and, in the process, build the power to change the publishing industry for the better.
Voting closes on Wednesday 22 October. You can read more about the SoA here.
Matt Abbott Poet 
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