Banned Books Week 2022

Two-hundred years before Christ, the Chinese emperor, Shih Huang Ti, summoned 460 writers to his palace and put them on trial. They were all found guilty and buried alive. Then the emperor gathered one copy of every book that existed and stored it in the Imperial Library and had all other manuscripts destroyed. From then…

Writing as the Practice of Freedom: Banned Books Week 2020

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses came out in 1988. He spent the next ten years in hiding. Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, didn’t approve of Rushdie’s portrayal of Mohamed, and pronounced a fatwah, a death sentence, on the author. The fatwah was eventually lifted after Khomeini’s death (although officially fatwahs can only…

Seven Great Banned Books

In celebration of Banned Books Week – Sept 25-Oct 1 – here’s some great literature that governments banned at one time or another. Rather than the usual suspects — Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, the Harry Potter series (witchcraft!), and pretty much everything Orwell and Solzhenitzyn wrote — I’ve gone for a few of the more…