Should we despair pt 3: Book bans?

Ask Alice is an online column written by our former Secretary, Dr Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction mini, under ‘A B Endacott’.

If you’re at all proximate to the literary ecosystem, you’ll almost certainly be aware of the mass book ban efforts in America. It’s pretty depressing, especially as this is a substantial increase from when I wrote about this last year.

With that in mind, and in celebration of Banned Books Week between October 5 and 11, to consider the last horseman of the literary apocalypse (the first two being minimal diversity in publishing, and seemingly low literacy rates), this month I’m asking: should we despair over the state of book bans? 

First, a quick recap on the three different types of book ban:

1. Shadow banning: Arising from unwillingness to engage with a book following public outrage or scandal over the content.
2. Restriction of access: Prohibiting people under a particular age to access certain texts.
3. Outright banning: Achieved through removal from libraries or even an interdiction against selling it.

Moreover, the majority of book bans are targeted towards either material specifically for young people, or to which young people have access. The why is something I can cover in an entirely separate column, but in essence, it’s to do with moral panics, a desire to control the ideologies and ideas to which young people are exposed, and generally, a lack of actual awareness of what’s in the book (horrifyingly, most people who jump up and down about a particular book haven’t even read it).

Let’s get right into it by looking at what’s going on in the USA. I won’t lie. It’s not good.

Back in February, Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America (one of America’s largest non-profits dedicated to protecting free expression in literature and beyond), said: “we are seeing multiple levels of law, of political officials from local school boards to the federal government all trying to exert new ideological control to censor what can be taught in schools.”

The same article notes that PEN America tracked in excess of 10,000 public school book bans in the 2023-2024 school year. Moreover, the data shows a clear pattern of bans being targeted against authors of colour, women and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

In many instances, these bans aren’t labelled as such, but instead referred to as ‘withdrawal’ or ‘removal’ – a shadow ban that slides under the radar of people who might resist it because of the less aggressive terminology.

However, there are also some extremely brazen bans. Last July, Idaho passed into law HB 710, which forbids anyone under the age of 18 from accessing books deemed “harmful to minors,” including those depicting “sexual conduct,” in school or public libraries. The Idaho law expands on previous laws by removing books from public libraries in addition to school libraries. Books affected include The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, and even nonfiction texts such as What’s Happening to My Body by Lynda Madaras.

A coalition including Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks, alongside three authors, a public library district, US writers’ body the Authors Guild, a teacher, two students and two parents, is suing the state over the legislation (similar lawsuits have been filed against Florida, Iowa, and Texas), but we’ll see what comes of that – it’s hard to find any update on this beyond February.

Let’s zoom in on Texas. In May 2025, a bill was proposed in the Texas state legislature which would “exposed booksellers to lawsuits over materials deemed inappropriate for children.” Essentially anybody could have filed a civil suit against a bookseller for selling supposedly ‘obscene’ content to a minor. Fortunately, this did not come to pass. However, at the start of the year, the Texas state legislature did pass HB 900, which went into effect at the start of September, 2025 and “requires book vendors to assign ratings to books based on the presence of depictions or references to sex.” In school libraries, books with a “sexually explicit” rating will be removed from bookshelves. Students who want to check out school library books deemed “sexually relevant” require prior parental permission.

The lawsuit against HB 900 is in part due to the impossible administrative burden this puts onto booksellers to implement these ratings, especially because of the term’s vagueness.

My favourite bit about these kinds of bans, by the way, is that they reportedly cost districts between $34,000 and $135,000 a year. What a waste of time and money.

Were I living in the United States, I would certainly be despairing about this.

Concerningly, this lunacy, while an American jumbo-size within the States, is creeping elsewhere.

In Britain, it would seem there are increasing requests to remove books from libraries (school and otherwise). Most challenges appear to come from individuals or small groups, unlike in the US, where 72% of demands to censor books last year were brought forward by organised groups. Challenges in Britian centre largely on LGBTQ+ materials (more than half of which were ultimately removed from the shelves), while US attacks appear to target material related to race, ethnicity and social justice as well as LGBTQ+ issues. Britain doesn’t have extensive or comprehensive studies into book bans, though, so while we know this is happening, it’s hard to how widespread this is, or the way this manifests.

With that being said, there are some banning efforts which manage to draw attention. Budmouth Academy in Weymouth removed The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas from its year 10 reading list after a complaint from a parent – one parent!! – who also raised a complaint about another book, Pigeon English. The parent’s complaint? The explicit language and sexual references in the book. Hundreds of students and parents have signed a change.org petition requesting a reversal of this decision, although as of time of writing, this hasn’t happened. Although the book was still available to older students via the school library, it’s alarming that one parent’s complaint would override the pedagogical experience and decisions of a trained faculty of educators. Worth pointing out, as I’ve previously explored, one of the reasons books with more mature content are studied in schools is to specifically allow students to be exposed to this content in a mediated environment, so they can unpack and understand it.

Do I despair about the state of things in England? No, but I’m certainly not pleased about the seeming increase of challenges to books, or the way a single obnoxious parent can dictate what’s taught in schools.

Taking a broader approach to bans, Alberta, a province in Canada, decided, following intense lobbying from so-called ‘parents’ rights’ groups, to remove books from schools which contain “explicit sexual content,” defined as “content containing a detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act” includes works of literature such as Margaret Atwood (herself a Canadian)’s The Handmaids Tale, George Orwell’s 1984 (I mean, for heaven’s sake), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Somewhat hearteningly, there has been pushback, including from school boards themselves, especially over how broad and vague “explicit sexual content” is. Edmonton Public Schools cited the removal of the abovementioned books, which are deemed classics, to highlight the fact that this ban is far too extensive.

This pushback did seem to have some effect. The Alberta government delayed the implementation of the ban to review the rules, which were eventually revised to replace “written passage” with “visual depiction” – the latter of which is defined as “a drawing or painting, an illustration, a photographic or digital image or a video file” with anatomy books being excepted.

Worryingly, the legislation requires all school boards, charter and independent schools to send the education minister’s office a list of all material they plan to remove from libraries by the end of October 2025, with removal to be implemented by January 2026. Even more worrying is that, according to Alberta Education and Childcare Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, “this requirement was so the province can provide oversight and guidance to schools, and that the province has no plans to publish the list of removed books.”

Goodness, if I were living in Alberta, I’d surely despair. The opacity of what books get banned in particular really strikes me, here. However, across Canada, it seems that while there are efforts to have books banned in some form or another, they are largely unsuccessful. Moreover, these efforts are really well publicised, thanks to The Canadian Library Challenge Database.

So what about Australia?

Well, things look pretty rosy. In 2024, there were 155 individual challenges across Australia – in comparison to the above, a positively adorable number. Most of these books were by or about LGBTQIA+ people, or books dealing with race.

Beyond last year’s big scandal regarding Gender Queer and its reapproval for sale in Australia following a federal court fight, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of bans. I reached out to two school librarians (admittedly, a very poor data sample), and both of them confirmed they had no experience of parents or any special interest groups trying to remove a book from the shelves. Heartening, but not exactly conclusive, or comforting, given the US ideology and approach does seem to have quite some export appeal – as we saw with Gender Queer here, and in Alberta.

Also, Australia and Britain have something in common: a lack of cohesive investigation into the efforts to ban books in any form, so it’s entirely possible there are shadow bans or restrictions to access that aren’t well captured.

Interestingly, when it comes to titles which become the target of banning, I have almost never seen any discourse over books authored by problematic people. Tom, who works in a school library in regional Victoria drew this to my attention when I reached out to him. His comment was that while he had never encountered parent objections to books, he himself curated the library’s collection, weeding out or removing from prominence books by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Oliver Phommavanh, or J K Rowling (Rowling is interesting; many religious groups have raised objection to her books on the grounds that they contain witchcraft, yet the discourse about her books on the basis of her aggressively transphobic views and actions is generally relegated to boycotting rather than banning them). Food for thought, certainly.

While I’m not despairing over the state of things in Canada, Britain, or Australia, we can’t ignore what’s going on in America. Banning efforts there are exported to other countries and have a bigger effect, not just on what people don’t read, but on what doesn’t get published.

Andrew Wooldridge, the publisher of Canadian publisher, Orca Book Publishers, noted: “with the U.S. accounting for a significant boost in recent years for politically and culturally progressive books […] bans can have a significant impact on sales.” The censorship also results in a chilling effect across the business. Wooldridge added, “there are books of ours buyers will not touch, even if they haven’t been challenged. Because they don’t want to run the risk of having that angry mom show up at the school board meeting.” As this article observes, “When books are banned from libraries and schools, it lowers their potential to connect with readers and, consequently, their sales opportunities. […] few authors and publishers can afford to risk publishing stories that could face backlash and get pulled from shelves.”

I’ve previously noted that we’ve seen major US-based publishers extend into conservative publishing spaces, whilst also halting the extension of diversification within their own workforce. While there will be a slight delay before we can properly track what kinds of stories are being published, it would certainly be likely that we see fewer narratives which represent diverse voices and experiences or challenge narratives about hegemonic power structures which abuse and oppress.

Credit is due to Penguin Random House who seem to be at least trying to fight book bans, although they’re currently being sued by Trump for a laughable $15 billion USD. However, analysis I saw by @adastra_stories on Instagram noted that with the courts essentially stacked with pro-Trump judges, there may be incentive for PRH to settle, as has been the case for other media groups (ABC News, Paramount, and today – Google) who have been similarly sued by everybody’s favourite oversized oompa-loompa. You can see how this, combined with the chilling effect on sales/publications, is a cause for significant concern about the future of what’s being published.

All of this paints a picture that leaves me worried, and, yes, despairing a little. Things seem ok for now in Australia, but I really do worry about where this could be leading, not only who it might empower, but in what kind of literary culture it encourages in the US which, like it or not, has a huge influence on us.

A grim note on which to end, but unfortunately that’s sometimes how it is.