OK, this is just a quick one, which will be filed away in my Oddments section almost immediately after the email goes out. It’s mostly intended for other writers. Sorry … I couldn’t resist.
The background is, Patrick Ness, Damian Barr, Juno Dawson, and hundreds of other writers you’ve probably never heard of have signed an open letter in support of Sally Rooney and Faber & Faber following the news that Rooney and Faber will no longer sell her books in the UK due to government legislation against the Palestine Action group.
The below letter is not that letter … I revised the original a bit for the sake of clarity.
If you’re a writer or an editor, I hope you will take a second to set aside your critical faculties, become totally outraged at the injustice that is being done to Sally Rooney (or that she is doing to herself), and then circulate this plea for solidarity widely (i.e., my revised version, not the original version, which you may want to read before you read my revised version).
Oh, and … if you’re going to be in Berlin on October 26, and have nothing else to do, you can come watch me be sentenced in District Court for tweeting the cover art of one of my books, a book which was actually banned, and for which I have now been indicted a second time, and which prompted the German police to raid my home in November of last year, which is probably why this Sally Rooney stunt has gotten my panties in such a twist.
All best wishes from New Normal Berlin,
C. J. Hopkins
Thoughtcriminal 231Js1736/23
Statement of solidarity with Sally Rooney
As authors, illustrators, poets, and editors, we stand with Sally Rooney and Faber Books, and condemn a government whose actions, and inactions, have led Sally and Faber to withdraw her books from sale in the UK and launch a massive worldwide PR campaign intended to fool readers into believing that her books have been banned by the UK authorities.
Writers face actual book bans (i.e., not fake book bans) throughout the world. It is unconscionable that a government can now force an insanely popular author like Sally Rooney to make a mockery of those actual book bans (i.e., the bans imposed on other, less-popular authors by actual government authorities) by banning her own books and fooling millions of readers into believing that the government authorities have banned them. What future governments (or popular authors) might do with this awesome power should frighten us all.
We call on the Labour government to lift the proscription of Palestine Action that has forced Sally Rooney and Faber & Faber to launch this PR campaign, and deceive other authors and readers into going along with it, and that has seen thousands of peaceful protesters arrested for expressing political opinions in the UK (i.e., actually arrested, not “pretend-arrested” in the course of conducting an elaborate PR campaign).
A country that forces writers to ban their own books—and that forces journalists to shamelessly over-use the passive voice in order to conceal who is actually “banning” their books—is not a free country. If you force Sally Rooney to ban herself, you force all of us to ban all of us, or to have been banned by all of us, or to have been forced to pretend to have been banned by all of us.
Je suis Sally Rooney!
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