Letter from 85 leading authors including Iain M Banks and Michael Moorcock hits out at 'sneering tone' of World Book Night programmes towards commercial fiction

Elder statesmen science fiction authors Iain M Banks and Michael Moorcock are among the 85 authors who have written to BBC director-general Mark Thompson complaining about the "shabby treatment of genre fiction" on World Book Night last month.

From children's authors Tamora Pierce and Debi Gliori to crime novelist SJ Bolton, horror writer Ramsey Campbell and fantasy authors Steven Erikson, Stephen Hunt and Juliet Marillier, the 85 writers believe the "sneering tone that was levelled towards commercial fiction" during the BBC's programming on World Book Night was "deeply counterproductive to the night's aims of actually encouraging people to read novels".

The BBC's coverage on 5 March included The Books We Really Read: a Culture Show Special and New Novelists: 12 of the Best.

Hunt, who organised the joint letter from the writers to the BBC, said that "the weight that was given to the single sub-genre of literary fiction in the remaining programmes was unbalanced and unrepresentative of all but a small fraction of the country's reading tastes".

"Closest to my own heart, the failure to feature a single work from the three genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction was a disgrace," he said, before pointing out that "the official World Book Night list included Philip Pullman's fantasy novel, Northern Lights. It is a shame the BBC could not."

"There have been weeks when one in three books sold in the UK were Harry Potter novels, or more recently, Twilight novels. The sweeping under the carpet of the very genres of the imagination which engage and fire readers' minds shows a lot more about the BBC production team's taste in fiction than it does about what the general public is actually reading."

Other authors to put their names to the letter include science fiction writers Neal Asher, Harry Turtledove, Greg Bear, Charles Stross, Robert J Sawyer and Elizabeth Moon.