Sensitivity reading

Author Anthony Horowitz has said it's wrong "writers are running scared" due to a fear of offending, elaborating on comments he made earlier this year at Hay Festival.

Kate Clanchy's memoir about teaching won the Orwell prize. Then, a year later, it became the centre of a storm that would engulf the lives of the author, her critics and dozens of people in the book trade. So what happened?

What did the sensitivity readers say? And did I care? Of all the aspects of the recent attempt to cancel my work, the one that seems to fascinate most people is the moment when my publishers sent my Orwell Prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, to be assessed by experts who would detect and reform its problematic racism and ableism.

American dirt was supposed to be a major book of the year. Jeanine Cummins's novel, which follows a Mexican bookseller and her son as they dodge cartel violence and attempt to cross the border into the United States, had all the makings of a blockbuster.  Read more

Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, has warned that "politically correct censorship" risks turning the world of fiction into a "timid, homogeneous, and dreary" place, and called on her fellow novelists to take a stand against it.