WRITERS of films and books will soon rely on the patronage of the super-rich, Writers Guild of Great Britain president Olivia Hetreed warned yesterday amid growing concern about their incomes.

The Bafta-winning screenwriter, who wrote the screenplays for Girl with the Pearl Earring and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, said that the creative sphere was threatened by free content and fragmented audiences online.

Only recently, Australian novelist and newly-announced Man Booker prize-winner Richard Flanagan revealed that he had considered coalmining to pay the bills after finishing his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as reported in yesterday’s Morning Star.

“Creative wages are low and falling,” Ms Hetreed told the Star.

“Transnational companies or very wealthy individuals will make more and more of the choices about what we watch, hear and read.”

Writers Guild’s general secretary Bernie Corbett has proclaimed a “cultural crisis,” saying writers would in future receive only “1p or 2p for every copy sold as an ebook” and would “stop writing.”

He said governments refused to challenge the monopolies of the likes of Amazon and Apple because “these global corporations are more powerful than countries.

“They set the online prices and no one else in the world has the power to dispute with them.”

He added: “Creativity will revert to being a hobby of the wealthy and since that won’t produce much of value, humanity will fall back on the warehouse of old material, since no one can afford to produce anything new.”