Who Gets To Decide What We Read?

Somewhere in the world right now, a writer is in prison for something they wrote. The 2026 Case List for PEN International captures a troubling global pattern of persecution. China leads the world in jailing writers, with 119 of them behind bars at last count. The steepest increase came from Iran, where authorities carried out 17 new arrests, driving numbers back toward the levels seen during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.  

In Malaysia, it is not the writers, but the books that are in danger. Government authorities banned 24 titles in 2025 up to October for being 'undesirable’ publications with content considered to be ‘prejudicial to morality’. Several of the prohibited books reportedly contain LGBTQIA+ themes. In Gaza, it goes further than banning: PEN America has documented the deaths of 151 Palestinian cultural figures since October 2023 and the destruction of 36 libraries, schools and cultural sites, with books deliberately burned. Add it all up and the number of jailed writers worldwide has passed 400.  

America's version of this looks a little quieter, but it isn't by any means smaller. Book bans there happen through paperwork: a form, a school board vote, a silent removal from a shelf. Last school year alone, 3,743 books were removed from school libraries and classrooms. Almost a third of those titles are based around themes of activism, including battling racism and attacks on LGBTQIA+ communities.  

“Book bans are largely driven by fear, moral panic and political signalling,” says Kasey Meehan, the director of Freedom to Read, a PEN America programme to fight the banning of books. “The targeting of these themes and identities has generated a chilling effect across education. Decision-makers are more fearful about bringing certain books – books that young people want and need – into school and public libraries.” 

The pattern is not confined to America. “Literature's role is to transport us into different mindsets. Books help us make sense of a messy, complicated world,” says Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of UK-based free-speech charity, Index on Censorship. What has changed, she argues, is that the US is now stopping the stocking of books along ideological lines, and Britain is not exempt.  

A Reform-led council in Kent claims to have excluded transgender related books from the county’s children’s libraries last year. At a secondary school in Greater Manchester, a headteacher's objection to a single title stocked in the school’s library (Laura Bates' Men Who Hate Women), escalated into a disciplinary investigation of the librarian and the removal of more than 130 titles, with the school admitting it had used AI to select those volumes deemed “neither age nor content appropriate.”

It was not an isolated case: a 2024 survey of UK school librarians found that 53% of respondents had been asked to remove books, most often by parents, and that in just over half of those cases, the books came off the shelf. “Ultimately, it’s about control, and a sense that books challenge that control,” adds Jemimah.  

Yet as censorship continues to rise, so does the fight against it. In 2022, the author Margaret Atwood commissioned a limited edition, unburnable version of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (watch her interview with Dua about the book here). Since its publication in 1985, the book has been banned – or faced calls for banning – in states across the US, as well as in countries including Portugal and Spain, on grounds of profanity, sexual content, being anti-Christian and featuring LGBTQIA+ characters. Celebrating the inflammable volume in The Atlantic, Margaret wrote, “To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more.”  

Not all resistance is a bookshop or a bonfire. When Sarah Wynn-Williams published her Meta memoir, Careless People, in 2025, the company didn't ban it. It took her to private arbitration and won an emergency gag order barring her from promoting the book or criticising her former employer. This June, she sued Meta back, arguing the order is an unconstitutional restraint on her speech and that the company spent more than a year surveilling and photographing her at public appearances to enforce it – including one panel where she was compelled to sit silently rather than speak.  

Last year, the Index on Censorship relaunched the Banned Books Week programme in the UK. “The week is about celebrating reading and those who make it possible, while highlighting the very real and serious attacks that are taking place around the world,” says Jemimah. The American version of the project takes place between 4-10 October this year, under the theme Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read. “It's best to stay ahead of the game,” she adds. “Highlight where pressure is and why, and champion diverse reading.”

For Kasey, a proactive approach to book banning is crucial. “More and more, people are organising to remind decision-makers that diverse bookshelves are positive and necessary in supporting literacy, building empathy, providing lifelines, and fostering a love of reading and learning,” she says.  

Further resistance is emerging in bricks and mortar form. The Service95 Book Club has just opened the Manifesto Library in collaboration with Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto, Portugal: a permanent space dedicated to books that challenge power, censorship, exclusion and dominant narratives. “Many of the works gathered here were banned, censored or contested precisely because they challenged established ideas. Bringing them together is not only an act of preservation, it’s an affirmation of the enduring importance of intellectual freedom and the circulation of ideas,” says Livraria Lello’s Francisca Pedro Pinto.  

“This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed,” adds Service95 founder Dua Lipa. “Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it.” 

Additional reporting by Simon Coates.