Best-selling Australian author Amie Kaufman, whose books have banned in the US, is warning against importing a culture war over literature.
Book bans across schools and libraries have increased rapidly in the US over the past five years, in a trend that has also hit Australian shores with Sydney’s Cumberland City Council attracting controversy this week for voting to4349 book bans were recorded across 23 states and 52 public school districts from July to December 2023. That reflects more bans in the first half of the current school year than in the entire 2022-2023 year, in which 3362 books were targeted.
According to the American Library Association, just a handful of people are driving the record number of challenges to books in the US. Aof thousands of challenges found that 60 per cent of all challenges in the 2021-2022 school year came from 11 adults, each of whom objected to dozens – sometimes close to 100 – of books in their districts.
Most of the books in question are about race, gender identity and sexual orientation. Non-fiction books about menstruation, or dealing with sexual assault and rape, have been labelled pornography by those wanting to ban them, says Hall. “For those books to be called pornographic, it is a heinous and egregious misuse of those terms,” she says.
It’s almost a mirror image of what has been experienced in the US. Thus far, ALIA has been working behind the scenes to assist staff affected, but Warburton says the Cumberland ban was a tipping point. “Thank goodness the legal structure in Australia is very different to the States,” Warburton says. “In NSW the public libraries act and guidelines make it clear that you can’t take books off shelves on discriminatory grounds.”
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