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Stop censoring Enid Blyton!

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Messing with Enid Blyton is not confined to Hachette finds Ariane Sherine, who complains about the preposterousness of it all:

Spectator

Six years ago, the publishers Hachette took the well-meaning yet preposterous step of making ‘sensitive text revisions’ to Enid Blyton’s classic Famous Five books. So ‘tinker’ was changed to ‘traveller’, ‘mother and father’ to ‘mum and dad’ and ‘awful swotter’ to ‘bookworm’. The suggestion that tomboy George needed ‘a good spanking’ became ‘a good talking to’, while girly Anne’s assertion, ‘You see, I do like pretty frocks — and I love my dolls — and you can’t do that if you’re a boy’ had its final clause removed, rendering the sentence throwaway rather than poignant. Unsurprisingly, given that all the charm had been stripped out of them, the revised editions flopped, and last weekend it was reported that Hachette were reverting to the originals. The publishers conceded that the updates had proved ‘very unpopular’.

But Hachette isn’t the only culprit. Earli­­­er this year, I bought my five-year-old daughter one of the Blyton titles I had enjoyed most as a child, The Magic Faraway Tree. I read it aloud to her, expecting to feel warmly nostalgic, but I merely felt baffled and irritated to discover that the publishers, Egmont, had also made several unnecessary changes. The names Fanny and Dick had been changed to Frannie and Rick. At first, I thought this was a misguided effort to avoid schoolchildren giggling at unintentional innuendo, but then I found that the names Jo and Bessie had also been pointlessly updated to Joe and Beth.

Even more annoyingly, the disciplinarian Dame Slap had been renamed Dame Snap, and in the new version she merely shouted at her unfortunate charges rather than hitting them. Despite my distaste at experiencing regular corporal punishment as a child, I couldn’t help but feel that this modification was ludicrous. Dame Slap was meant to be frightening, and her students’ terror was far more plausible when she was given to meting out painful violence rather than simply vocalising her displeasure. This is prudish editing at its most confused, as though mentioning an old-fashioned, outlawed practice were condoning it or advocating that it should be part of modern British schooling.

via Stop censoring Enid Blyton!.

No taboo should be off limits when writing for teenagers, says Non Pratt

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guardiansmallThe boundaries exist; whether writers should obey them is another matter.
Once a book is published, it is out of the writer’s control. All it takes is for one person to object to a book for no one in that school, or library, to be given access to it. What a writer can control are the words they put on the paper and it is our job to tell the story, not second-guess the audience – or the adults who police the audience. If we observe the rules of what we “shouldn’t” write about, then we are not preventing the students in a single school from reading our truth, we are preventing every reader in the world from reading it.

via No taboo should be off limits when writing for teenagers | Children’s books | The Guardian.

Why we shouldn’t censor teen literature

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Speaking out against censorship by Emily Sanna, associate editor of U.S.Catholid

The best books are those that pick us up, grab us, and don’t let us go until the final page. They are books that remain in our imaginations, long after the last page is turned. And often, these are books where there are characters or situations that we can identify with. The same is true for young adult literature; teenagers aren’t going to pick up a book unless they feel like there is something in the book that is connected to their real lives. If we want kids to become readers, we need to have the courage—as parents, educators, and publishers—to give them books where the characters are living through the same issues that they see every day in the world around them. At best, they have a framework to make sense of the world’s injustices going forward. At worst, it tells them that they aren’t alone.

via Why we shouldn't censor teen literature | USCatholic.org.

Interview: Judy Blume and her battle against the bans – Index on Censorship | Index on Censorship

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From the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine, US author Judy Blume talks to Vicky Baker about parents’ and teachers’ overly protective attitudes to young people’s feelings, and how she has spent the last 45 years tackling bans and censorship

via Interview: Judy Blume and her battle against the bans – Index on Censorship | Index on Censorship.

Author of banned book hits back: ‘Teenagers aren’t that stupid’

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‘Into the River’, which won Book of the Year at the 2013 NZ Post Children’s Book Awards, has been banned from sale or supply after a complaint from conservative lobby group Family First.

The story follows a Maori boy and his problems with bullying. It also features sex and drug use.

The president of the Film and Literature Board of Review Don Mathieson QC slapped an interim ban on the book pending a review of the Censor’s decision to make the book available to all readers instead of R14.

It is the first time a book has been banned by the Board of Review in 22 years.

Author Ted Dawe said teenagers use literature like his as a reference point and they’ll have – or not have – sex with or without his book.

“I’ll tell you one thing, teenagers hate being patronised and they hate being not included,” he said. “That’s why I write the way I do. I don’t think people will be encouraged or take drugs. I don’t think teenagers are that stupid.”

“My book isn’t exploitative, it’s not erotic, it’s a serious work of artistic and social import, and that’s the difference. If they can’t see that difference, I can’t explain it to them.”

Dawe also said groups who have made complaints resulting in a temporary removal of the text from shelves are pushing their beliefs on others.

“I just don’t want them dictating to me and to other people what we can and can’t say. That’s when they exceed the bounds of their freedoms and impinge on other people’s.”

Dawe also reiterated his book is aimed at teenagers not children.

via Author hits back: ‘Teenagers aren’t that stupid’.

Why there are no taboos in Scandinavian children’s books

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guardiansmallIn Scandinavia there are no taboos when it comes to writing, even for children and young people. Books for teens exploring sexuality with explicit language are not censored. It’s so normal for us. There is nothing I can’t cover as a teen writer and I know my publisher would stand by me no matter what.

Here are a couple of examples to explain what I mean. The book Fittekvote by Axel Hellstenius and Morten Skårdal, about young girls in the military, won a literature prize in 2011. It would be called “Cunt Quota” if translated into English.

Another book, Tjuven (“The Thief”) by Rune Belsvik, is aimed at children around eight years old. In it, the main character, Jolver, learns how to masturbate from his friend Bob. The friend tells him how it’s good to touch yourself while looking at naked women in a magazine. I can’t quite see this happening in the UK… yet.

 

… …

In Scandinavia, and in Norway in particular, it’s possible to make a living as a YA author, even if you aren’t a bestseller. It’s OK to write a debut novel, fail and still get another chance. My debut book was published in 1998 – it was a decent debut, promising, said the critics. The most inspiring sentence was, as I still recall it: “Ingelin Røssland has written her first novel but it will not be the last”. I took it as a sign that I had potential to grow and improve. So I kept on writing and book by book I reached out to more young readers.

In 2006 and 2007 I started to win awards and my books started to be translated, first into German, then French and now, with Minus Me, in English. To be published in English feels like a miracle, but in reality it is hard work. Having a publisher that believed in me really helped, letting me write the books that I felt I needed to write, not what the market wanted. This has been a huge privilege for me and many other Norwegian writers such as Jostein Gaarder, who wrote the bestseller Sophie’s World, Johan Harstad, who wrote the brilliant sci-fi/horror novel 172 Hours on the Moon and Lene Ask, whose beautiful graphic novel Dear Richard was recently published in English.

via Why there are no taboos in Scandinavian children’s books | Children’s books | The Guardian.

Green eggs and tofu? – in praise of pigs in children’s books

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Harry Oulton, the author of A Pig Called Heather, published by Piccadilly Press, writes in Guardian Review:
guardiansmall

A leading publisher recently suggested that, to avoid causing offence in the global market, writers and illustrators should try not to feature too many pigs, or indeed include too many references to pork-based foodstuffs, in their children’s books. Following their advice, I have just gone to my daughter’s primary school and removed all traces of literature about pigs from the shelves. It took me a while as I had to get rid of all the copies of Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, Pig Heart Boy, selected Beatrix Potters, Dr Doolittle, Olivia and many Peppa Pig books.

via Green eggs and tofu? – in praise of pigs in children’s books | Books | The Guardian.

Judy Blume: ‘I thought, this is America: we don’t ban books. But then we did”

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Judy Blume: ‘I thought, this is America: we don’t ban books. But then we did’
The award-winning author tells Alison Flood about sex, censorship and touring with a security guard…

“When I started, in the 70s, it was a good time for children’s book writers. Children’s reading was much freer than in the 80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy. My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don’t have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don’t do this, we don’t ban books. But then they did.”

via Judy Blume: ‘I thought, this is America: we don’t ban books. But then we did” | Books | The Guardian.