Speaking to The Evening Standard, Anthony Horowitz, one of the most prolific and successful writers in the UK, reveals that he is “thinking about quitting children’s books over censorship”. The interview continues:
“Anthony Horowitz, one of the most prolific and successful writers in the UK, is speaking urgently and passionately. “You can take the ‘N’ word out of James Bond or the ‘fat’ word out of Roald Dahl, but that is only the beginning. They will ask for a word, then it will be a paragraph, then it will be a page, then it will be the whole book, then it will be the whole author — and that is already happening.”
“Every word I am speaking to you now I am thinking about before I utter it. That didn’t used to be the case.”
“He has agreed to speak about free speech and attacks on artistic freedom because he feels a sense of duty to highlight the “new atmosphere of relentlessness in seeking punishment, retribution and cancellation” in the literary world. Critics are like sharks waiting to jump, he says, and offence has no time limit. “You can offend somebody in the 21st century with something you said in 1970.”
“He points to what is happening in America, which is “always one step ahead of us”, where books including Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, have been withdrawn from some libraries. Horowitz describes an oppressive world where writers are walking on egg-shells, which is very different from when he began his career with the publication of his first children’s book in 1979.
“When he writes there is a “certain nervousness” about what is acceptable, he says, adding: “I certainly feel it in my writing where I come to a word and have to really ask myself if I am describing someone of a different ethnicity or gender or anybody who is different to me, which words are allowable. And that is extremely damaging because creativity is the exact opposite of that.” There is now a tendency to think the worst of writers, he says, from Ian Fleming to Roald Dahl. Yet the impetus of a writer is to “share joy and to open doors to different worlds, to the understanding of life. It’s the exact opposite of what sometimes writers are being characterised as”.
“Censoring books, he says, “is an appetite that will never, ever be satisfied”. The only thing writers can do is “to stand up against it and ignore it and fight back and to write what you believe in. We cannot be allowed to be told what we can and cannot write, who we can and cannot offend, what words we can or cannot use”.
It is in the context of describing this atmosphere of fear that he makes an astonishing admission. The writer of the much-loved teen spy series Alex Rider, which has sold 21 million copies, and the author of dozens of other children’s books, is currently questioning whether he will ever write for children again. It comes after one of his children’s books was edited by a young, and “I would dare say woke”, editor. The bruising experience left him questioning his own writing.
The book, which ended up being heavily rewritten by Horowitz, was published, but “it sort of made me think that I could never write another book for young people because the attitudes shown to me were so aggressive, so sort of destructive, so cynical”.
The encounter is “the reason why I am doubtful I will write anymore, in the children’s world”. He adds: “By the end of the process I was questioning myself, that was the problem. I wrote innocently and I wrote to make people laugh but when I read the book I thought, gosh really is this offensive? And that? And that? Am I all these things?
“Then I began to think to myself well how do I know I am not causing offence? And that therefore led me to the conclusion that perhaps it might be better to stick to adult books.
“I am being honest with you and open. I am just saying that these are the sorts of doubts that this atmosphere raises.” Choosing his words carefully, he says he has not made any final decisions, but he does not have any children’s books in his head at the moment. “I have an Alex Rider out… but it’s quite possible that it’s just time to pull up the drawbridge and stop.
“That is not an announcement that I am going to do it — it is simply something that I am thinking and considering.
The interview concludes: “Despite fears of cancel culture, [Horowitz] says he still writes from his heart, because it is not possible to write “with one eye on The Guardian and one eye on your script”. He has no set routine and no target daily word count: “There is no special pen, no special paper, no rules — just write. I try to stay free and that means being free to write when I want to, and how I want to, and what I want to.”
Worth reading in full.
