A new report has found that the number of banned non-fiction books doubled during the 2024-2025 school year in the US.

PEN America analysed the 3,743 unique titles removed from school libraries and classrooms in the July to June period and found that over 1,100 or 29% were non-fiction, more than double the year prior.

The most common theme in the banned non-fiction books was activism and social movements. “These titles help students learn about their rights and the stories of those who confronted injustice and participated in social movements to change the world around them,” said McKenna Samson, a co-author of the report.

Banned non-fiction titles included Challenges for LGBTQ+ Teens by Martha Lundin, Aztec, Inca, and Maya by Elizabeth Baquedano and Night by Elie Wiesel, a Nazi death camp memoir.

“This latest trend shows an embrace of anti-intellectualism, undermining public knowledge by devaluing education and expertise,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s freedom to read program. “It is another example of how censorship sweeps broadly, leading to removals of all kinds of books, in its efforts to sow fear and distrust in our public education system.”

The year also saw double the percentage of books about sex education being banned, including titles such as You Know, Sex: Bodies, Gender, Puberty and Other Things by Cory Silverberg.

Findings also showed high figures for marginalised communities with LGBTQ+ characters (39%) and people of colour (44%) continuing to be over-represented in the books being targeted.

Books about death and grief made up 48% of titles while those about empowerment and self-esteem made up 39%.

Fiction titles at risk in the past year included dystopian dramas such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and other books including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Push by Sapphire.

Since PEN America started documenting book bans in 2021, there have been more than 23,000 instances on record.

A report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year showed that a third of 12th-graders who had been federally tested did not have basic reading skills. Scores were the worst they had been for three decades.

The report arrives after findings from the American Library Association which shows that books banned in all US libraries saw a record high in 2025. Similarly, 40% of the titles challenged involved representations of LGBTQ+ people or people of colour.

The American Library Association (ALA) has reported a record high in the number of books banned in US libraries.

In 2025, 5,668 books were banned – representing 66% of the total number challenged – with an additional 920 censored through access restriction, such as relocation on the library shelves.

The most-banned book in 2025 was Sold, a 2006 novel by Patricia McCormick about sex trafficking in India. Other frequently challenged titles include The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Empire of Storms by Sarah J Maas.

According to the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), challenges were recorded against 4,235 unique titles in 2025. That figure is the second highest since the organisation began tracking censorship data more than 30 years ago, topped only by 4,240 titles in 2023.

The ALA also found that 40% of the materials challenged this year involved representations of LGBTQ+ people or people of colour.

The organisation usually publishes an annual list of the 10 most-banned books, but this year included 11 after four titles tied for eighth place. The list is compiled based on ALA analysis of 713 attempts to censor library materials and services in 2025. Of those attempts, 487 targeted books.

The report also found that challenges are becoming more coordinated and politically driven: 92% came from pressure groups, decision-makers or government officials, compared with 72% in 2024. By contrast, 2.7% were attributed to parents and 1.4% to individual library users.

“In 2025, book bans were not sparked by concerned parents, and they were not the result of local grassroots efforts,” said Sarah Lamdan, executive director of OIF. “They were part of a well-funded, politically driven campaign to suppress the stories and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and Bipoc individuals and communities.”

The ALA defines a “challenge” as an attempt to remove or restrict access to a library resource, while a “ban” refers to the removal of materials from a library.

Several US states, including Florida, Texas and Utah, have enforced laws that limit or remove books from schools, focusing on content related to sexual orientation, gender identity and materials considered “harmful to minors”. In Iowa, an appellate court ruled earlier this month that the state can implement a law restricting discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in certain school grades and banning some books.

The ALA’s list of the most challenged books of 2025:

1 Sold, by Patricia McCormick

2 The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

3 Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe

4 Empire of Storms, by Sarah J Maas

5 (tie) Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo

5 (tie) Tricks, by Ellen Hopkins

7 A Court of Thorns and Roses, by Sarah J Maas

8 (tie) A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

8 (tie) Identical, by Ellen Hopkins

8 (tie) Looking for Alaska, by John Green

8 (tie) Storm and Fury, by Jennifer L Armentrout

Olga Ravn, Daniel Kehlmann, Ia Genberg, Mathias Énard and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara are among those longlisted for the International Booker prize, which recognises the best translated fiction and turns 10 this year.

A “Booker dozen” of 13 books were longlisted for this year’s prize. One author-translator pair will win £50,000, to be split equally.

Ravn, Kehlmann, Genberg, Énard and Cabezón Cámara have all previously been shortlisted for the prize. This year, German author Kehlmann was chosen for The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, which is inspired by the life of the film-maker GW Pabst, who collaborated with the Third Reich.

“The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairytale,” wrote Nina Allan in a Guardian review. “It is Kehlmann’s best work yet.”

Danish writer Ravn was selected for her fourth novel, The Wax Child, translated by Martin Aitken, which is about real-life 17th-century Danish witch trials.

Witchcraft appears elsewhere on the longlist, in French writer Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, published in its original French in 1996. NDiaye was previously longlisted for the prize in 2016, and was shortlisted in the prize’s earlier incarnation in 2013, when it recognised writers for their entire body of work.

Another longlisted title published in its original language several decades ago is Women Without Men by Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh, which was published in Persian in 1989. In the 80s, Parsipur was imprisoned in Iran for five years. Soon after her release, she published Women Without Men and was jailed again. The book, in which five women from different life paths end up living together in a garden on the outskirts of Tehran, has been banned in Iran since 1989.

Swedish author Genberg made this year’s longlist for Small Comfort, translated by Kira Josefsson, a set of five interconnected stories. Meanwhile, Énard was longlisted for The Deserters, translated by Charlotte Mandell, which marks the 17th International Booker nomination for Fitzcarraldo, the most-nominated imprint in the prize’s history.

Another independent publisher recognised this year is Peirene Press with She Who Remains by Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, about a woman who avoids an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin.

Karabash is one of three debut writers on this year’s longlist, alongside German author Shida Bazyar with The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated by Ruth Martin, and The Duke by Italian author Matteo Melchiorre, translated by Antonella Lettieri.

Argentinian writer Cabezón Cámara was nominated for We Are Green and Trembling, translated by Robin Myers, which won the US National Book Award for translated literature last year.

Completing this year’s longlist is The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay; On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan; and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King.

“Many of the submitted books examined the devastating consequences of war, which is reflected in our longlist,” said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown. “The list also features petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, big pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison, and obscure film references. The page counts range from ‘pocket-friendly’ to ‘doorstopper’. And while the books’ original publication dates span four decades, each story feels fresh and innovative.”

This year’s shortlist of six books will be announced on 31 March, with each shortlisted title receiving £5,000, to be split equally between author and translator. The winner will be announced on 19 May at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.

Joining Brown on this year’s judging panel are mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and the writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy.

The longlist was selected from 128 titles published in the UK or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026. Booker prize foundation chief executive Gaby Wood said that this year’s submissions of books were originally written in a record total of 34 languages – “a sign, perhaps, that translated works from an ever-broader range of original languages are increasingly available to anglophone readers”.

Last year, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, became the first collection of short stories to take home the award. Other previous winners include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Georgi Gospodinov.

Wood noted that four authors recognised by the prize for a single book have gone on to win the Nobel for their body of work: Han, Tokarczuk, Jon Fosse – who was longlisted for the International Booker in 2020 and shortlisted in 2022 – and László Krasznahorkai, who was shortlisted in 2018.

The Irish author Sally Rooney has told the high court she is highly unlikely to be able to publish new work in the UK while the ban on Palestine Action remains in effect because of her public support for the group.

On the second day of the legal challenge to Palestine Action’s proscription, the effect on Rooney, who said her books could disappear from UK stores altogether, was held up as an example of its impact on freedom of expression.

In her witness statement, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends, said: “It is … almost certain that I can no longer publish or produce any new work within the UK while this proscription remains in effect.

“If Palestine Action is still proscribed by the time my next book is due for publication, then that book will be available to readers all over the world and in dozens of languages, but will be unavailable to readers in the United Kingdom simply because no one will be permitted to publish it (unless I am content to give it away for free).”

Since proscription, Rooney has said said she intends to use proceeds from her works to support Palestine Action, which led her to cancel a trip to the UK to pick up an award, for fear of arrest.

She said legal uncertainty meant it was difficult to predict how the ban would affect the availability of her books but it was possible that her publisher Faber & Faber would be legally prohibited from paying her the royalties she was owed, in which case “my existing works may have to be withdrawn from sale and would therefore no longer be available to readers in the UK”.

“My novels have been influential and popular in Britain, where I am among the best-selling literary authors of the last decade. The disappearance of my work from bookshops would mark a truly extreme incursion by the state into the realm of artistic expression.”

Rooney described Palestine Action’s work as “courageous and admirable” and said it was dedicated to preventing crimes against humanity by Israel. The author said she had not been presented with any reason to withdraw her support for the direct action protest group other that “it would be more convenient to me personally and professionally if I pretended to do so”.

The court heard on Thursday from Adam Straw KC, representing Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on protecting human rights whilst countering terrorism, one of three intervenors in the case (the others being Liberty and Amnesty UK).

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Straw said in written submissions: “There is a consensus, or emerging consensus, that this proscription was an unlawful interference in international law. There is also a consensus, or emerging consensus, that the definition of terrorism does not extend to serious damage to property.”

Responding for the home secretary, Sir James Eadie KC said the UK parliament had the right to define terrorism. “Parliament has decided what terrorism is, which includes serious damage to property, whether or not alongside it there is violence against people,” he said.

The Metropolitan police said 143 people had been arrested outside the court on Wednesday for alleged support of a proscribed group. The final day of the judicial review is scheduled for Tuesday.

A new report on book bans in US schools finds Stephen King as the author most likely to be censored and the country divided between states actively restricting works and those attempting to limit or eliminate bans.

PEN America’s Banned in the USA, released on Wednesday, tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.

Some 80% of those bans originated in just three states that have enacted or attempted to enact laws calling for removal of books deemed objectionable: Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Meanwhile, PEN found little or no instances of removals in several other states, with Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey among those with laws that limit the authority of school and public libraries to pull books.

“It is increasingly a story of two countries,” says Kasey Meehan, director of PEN’s Freedom to Read program and an author of Wednesday’s report. “And it’s not just a story of red states and blue states. In Florida, not all of the school districts responded to the calls for banning books. You can find differences from county to county.”

King’s books were censored 206 times, according to PEN, with Carrie and The Stand among the 87 works of his affected. The most banned work of any author was Anthony Burgess’s dystopian classic from the 1960s, A Clockwork Orange, for which PEN found 23 removals. Other books and authors facing extensive restrictions included Patricia McCormick’s Sold, Judy Blume’s Forever and Jennifer Niven’s Breathless, and numerous works by Sarah J Maas and Jodi Picoult.

Reasons often cited for pulling a book include LGBTQ+ themes, depictions of race, and passages with violence and sexual violence. An ongoing trend that PEN finds has only intensified: thousands of books were taken off shelves in anticipation of community, political or legal pressure rather than in response to a direct threat.

“This functions as a form of ‘obeying in advance’,” the report reads, “rooted in fear or simply a desire to avoid topics that might be deemed controversial.”

The PEN report comes amid ongoing censorship efforts not just from states and conservative activists, but from the federal government. The Department of Education ended an initiative by the Biden administration to investigate the legality of bans and has called the whole issue a “hoax”. PEN’s numbers include the Department of Defense’s removal of hundreds of books from K-12 school libraries for military families as part of an overall campaign against DEI initiatives and “un-American” thinking.

In Florida, where more than 2,000 books were banned or restricted, a handful of counties were responsible for many of the King removals: dozens were pulled last year as a part of a review of whether they were in compliance with state laws.

“His books are often removed from shelves when ‘adult’ titles or books with ‘sex content’ are targeted for removal – these prohibitions overwhelmingly ban LGBTQ+ content and books on race, racism and people of color – but also affect titles like Stephen King’s books,” Meehan says. “Some districts – in being overly cautious or fearful of punishment – will sweep so wide they end up removing Stephen King from access, too.”

PEN’s methodology differs from that of the American Library Association (ALA), which also issues annual reports on bans and challenges. PEN’s numbers are much higher in part because the free-expression organization counts any books removed or restricted for any length of time, while the ALA only counts permanent removals or restrictions.

Both organizations have acknowledged that because they largely rely on media reports and information that they receive directly, their numbers are far from comprehensive. Stephana Ferrell, director of research and insight at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, wrote in an email this week that total bans are “likely much higher” than in PEN’s snapshot analysis, based on the project’s ongoing public records requests.

The PEN report includes no banning data from Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other red states because researchers could not find adequate documentation. Meehan adds that PEN also doesn’t know the full impact of statewide laws.

“It’s become harder and harder to quantify the scope of the book banning crisis,” Meehan says. “In a state where a banning law is passed, we don’t have the data to know whether every school in that state had the books affected. Our data is a snapshot. It’s what we were able to collect through what’s publicly reported or on websites or what journalists have uncovered.”

The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.

Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

Censorship used to occur largely at the level of governments or other transnational authorities. It still does in authoritarian countries such as Iran and China, but western states generally liberalised in the mid-20th century. Yet a weaker form of censorship has long persisted within the American school system, where individual books are subject to “challenge” by parents who consider them inappropriate material for their children. Often, school boards will respond by removing those books from school libraries, in which case they have effectively been banned.

The phenomenon has accelerated in recent years. The machinery of school censorship in the US has also become significantly more corporate. According to the American Library Association’s analysis of its 2024 data, “the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organised movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries.” Between 2001 and 2020, such groups challenged an average of 46 titles per year. Last year, they challenged 4,190 titles in 12 months.

Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in schools and universities has led some school districts in Texas and Florida to proactively remove shelf-fulls of potential offenders within the last 12 months. Earlier this year, meanwhile, a man went into a public library in Ohio, checked out a number of books on Jewish, Black and LGBTQ+ history, and burned them all. The caption to a video of the bonfire read: “We are cleansing our libraries of degenerate filth.” Joseph Goebbels would have approved.

Here, then, is a selection of other books that have been considered degenerate filth …

Atwood’s 2003 post-apocalyptic fantasia, whose heroes smoke weed and watch very bad things on the internet before their everyday lives are swept away by a global pandemic, is among the most widely sanctioned by American schools. The particularly censorious Utah State Board of Education even bans pupils from carrying a copy into school to read in their personal time. All such perilous tomes, advises the board, must not be given away or resold but instead sent to a specified warehouse in a box clearly marked “sensitive materials”. Not to be outdone, in 2024 a Texas school district banned Oryx and Crake because it promoted “gender fluidity”.

The famous children’s books about witches and wizards might be more likely to attract opprobrium these days on the grounds of the author’s political opinions, but long before that, Potterphobes were trying to get the books off school shelves in the US on the grounds that they glorify the occult or actually “promote witchcraft”. They succeeded in a few cases, such as Zeeland, Michigan in 1999, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 2019. Which begs the question, can you promote something if it doesn’t exist?

The Indian-Canadian poet rose to fame on Instagram, and this collection of social media-friendly minimalist verse was initially self-published in 2014 before coming out commercially and going on to sell more than 11m copies. Popularity, however, is no defence against the literary‑prohibition complex, which in this case cited not Kaur’s refusal to employ upper-case letters but the fact that some of her poems explore themes of sexual assault. It was the joint-ninth most-banned book by US school districts in the 2022-23 school year and remains off limits in districts across eight states.

Hosseini’s 2003 novel set in Afghanistan before the Soviet occupation and then under the Taliban, which has sold more than 8m copies worldwide, has long been among the most banned books in US school districts, for its depictions of homosexuality, violence, or inter-Afghan ethnic tensions. The 2007 film adaptation was banned in Afghanistan itself under the government of Hamid Karzai. The Kite Runner is now one of many books removed from shelves in schools run by the US Department of Defense pending a review announced in 2024 – a ban that chimes with Donald Trump’s targeting of DEI.

Orwell’s story of totalitarian truth-twisting may have been partly inspired by his experience of working for the BBC, but the Soviets felt it was obviously aimed at them, and so the novel was banned in the USSR until 1988, along with homegrown masterworks such as Vasily Grossman’s second world war epic Life and Fate. But Orwell’s relevance has not since diminished: Russians protesting against the Ukraine war have been arrested for giving out free copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, while it remains forbidden to mention the novel’s title on Chinese social media.

The man who stabbed Rushdie in 2022, in an attempt to fulfil the Iranian fatwa, said at his sentencing that the writer “wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.” Apparently trying to kill people doesn’t count. Rushdie’s 1988 novel, which contains a dream-sequence riff on the life of the prophet Muhammad, was publicly burned in Bolton and Bradford, and banned in many countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Venezuela. In India, though, the original banning order seems to have been lost, leading a court to state in 2024 that it may no longer be valid.

Morrison’s debut novel, a fable about a young Black girl in the US who wishes her eyes would turn blue so that she would be perceived as beautiful, remains surprisingly controversial for a book that was published 55 years ago, coming in third on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently challenged books in 2024, and being banned in 29 school districts in the 2022-3 school year. Her later novel Beloved is almost as popular a target, proving that winning a Nobel prize in literature does not suffice to make your work suitable for teenagers.

This graphic novel about a young woman growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran was originally published in French in 2000. It was banned (as the author had foreseen) in Iran and for a while in Lebanon, but controversy struck when it was banned by the public schools of Chicago in 2013. That decision was later reversed, but Persepolis continues to be challenged and banned in states including, in 2023 and 24, Alaska, Iowa and Wisconsin. Such bans usually cite the book’s “graphic language and images” (a graphic novel is indeed likely to contain graphic images), though one complaining parent wrote to her Illinois school board to ask “why a book about Muslims was assigned on September 11”.

If you wanted to curry favour with the Chinese Communist party, you probably wouldn’t use as your novel’s title a phrase taken from President Xi himself, which he uses to describe a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, or indeed have as narrator an ambitious provincial political operative whose job is, as Ma has explained, “to suppress memories of the past and control speech in the present”. This 2018 novel is of course banned in China, as all Ma’s work has been since 1987, but it was the first that no Hong Kong publisher would touch, either. The party, he says, has “an army of censors”.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The novel that made Nabokov’s fortune was first published in France in 1955, since no American publisher would risk it. Its English-language publisher in France, Olympia Press, lost a lawsuit with the government the following year and the book was banned from sale. Meanwhile in Britain, it was illegal to import such “utter filth” and publication in the UK, as well as in Argentina and South Africa, was banned for several years: in New Zealand, it became legal only in 1964. For the New York Times in 1958 (when the French ban was lifted), Orville Prescott judged the novel “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion”, and also “repulsive”. It is currently banned in three American school districts.

This 2007 novel about a school shooting has the dubious honour of currently being the most widely sanctioned book by school districts in the US, according to writers’ group PEN America, with 98 bans. Does suppressing fiction about school shootings reduce the number of actual school shootings? This remains to be demonstrated. In any case, the most commonly cited reason for deeming Picoult’s novel unsuitable for teenagers is, as she explained at the Hay festival last year, her use on page 313 of the word “erection”.

The subject of the most celebrated obscenity trial of the 20th century, Lawrence’s pastoral romp was banned in Britain and other countries after its original private publication in 1928, though heavily expurgated versions were made available in the US and UK in 1932. Not until 1960 did a mainstream publisher, Penguin Books, attempt to bring out the full text, prompting a showdown with the government. “Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house?” asked the lead prosecutor on behalf of the Crown. “Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” The answer seemed to be yes, as Penguin won.

TV adaptations are usually good news for novels. After the 2017 Netflix adaptation of Asher’s YA teen-suicide novel hit the screens, the book was banned by school districts in eight US states. Some argued that the more sensationalised TV version was much more likely to have encouraged a seeming rash of real-life suicides in the following months. Banning the text, the author told a PBS interviewer, was likely to be counterproductive: “If we say issues of teen suicide, drinking, sex or sexual assaults are inappropriate, we’re telling teens who may identify with those themes that there isn’t a safe space for them.”

Aristophanes’s 2,500-year-old comedy about women who go on sex strike in order to stop the Greek city states from fighting each other is plainly likely to sap the masculine spirit of any modern nation-state that emphasises marital virtue. Logical, then, that it should have been banned in its homeland under the Nazi occupation and then under the military junta that took over Greece in 1967. From 1873, meanwhile, it was also banned in the US under the Comstock laws that prohibited lewd or obscene material from being sent through the post, a ban that was successfully overturned only in 1954.

Thomas’s much-admired YA novel about a Black teenager who sees her close friend shot by a police officer has, predictably, come high on the lists of books that are “most challenged” in American school districts since it was published in 2017. The various reasons include profanity, drug use and sexual references but also “racially insensitive language” – the latter a concern cited by the white superintendent of the Katy Independent School District in Texas, who personally pulled copies off the shelves. “You’re basically telling the kids … that their stories shouldn’t be told,” Thomas responded. “Well, I’m going to tell them even louder. Thanks for igniting the fire.”

Cleland wrote this pioneering 18th-century tract of very bawdy fiction – ostensibly the “memoirs of a woman of pleasure” – while in debtors’ prison. Within a year of its publication his publishers had been hauled to court on suspicion of “corrupting the King’s subjects” and the book was officially withdrawn, though samizdat copies continued to circulate. In the early 19th century a pirated version was published in the US, leading to that publisher’s conviction in Massachusetts for printing something so “lewd and obscene”. Remarkably, police seized a new edition of the novel in London in the 1960s under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, and the unexpurgated Fanny was not legally revealed until 1970.

Dahl’s oeuvre has recently been the subject of enthusiastic Bowdlerisation by Puffin, which released politically corrected versions of his texts in 2023 that, among other things, removed the word “fat”. But The Witches (1983) had already long been the subject of complaints in American schools. While liberal critics thought it misogynist because Dahl writes that witches are always women, concerned American parents had it banned in Dallas, Oregon for promoting occultism, and in Dublin, Ohio on the curious grounds that it was “derogatory to children”.

Ellis’s satirical masterpiece of men’s fashion, 1980s music pedantry and ultraviolence, having been dropped by its original publisher Simon & Schuster only three months before its publication date and then rescued by Vintage, has excited outrage in the censorially minded forever after. In the late 1990s Germany restricted sales to adults only, and for many years it was officially banned from sale in the state of Queensland, Australia, though in one of literary freedom’s smallest ever victories it can now be purchased shrink-wrapped, as long as you are over 18.

Any author who appears twice on such a list must be doing something right. Since her most famous novel is about a future United States devolving into a repressive sexist theocracy, the routine rightwing attempts to remove it from schools in the present-day US do come across as a case of protesting too much. The Handmaid’s Tale has been removed from school libraries in at least 10 US states. After it was made unavailable to high-school students in Madison County, Virginia, in 2023, Atwood suggested that perhaps the censorious wonks hoped to get teenagers interested in sex again by making mentions of it in print forbidden – and so irresistible. It remains banned in 67 US school districts.

Vonnegut’s first bestseller, centring on the firebombing of Dresden (which he had witnessed first-hand), but also with a satirically freewheeling attitude to matters religious, sexual and cosmic, was something of a pioneer in the school-banning stakes. A mere three years after its 1969 publication, it was banned in schools in Oakland, Michigan for being, as a judge thought, “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian”. In 1973, copies were burned in North Dakota because of its “obscene language”. In 2010 a college professor complained: “This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame.” In 2024, the novel was banned by school boards in Texas and Florida. So it goes.

The government in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir has banned 25 books, including works by the Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy, accusing them of promoting a “false narrative and secessionism” in the disputed territory.

The censorship order was issued by Manoj Sinha, the lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir, who was appointed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) under the prime minister, Narendra Modi. Sinha was previously a minister in Modi’s BJP government.

According to the directive issued by Jammu and Kashmir’s home ministry on Sinha’s instructions, it had “come to the notice of the government, that certain literature propagates false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir”.

The 25 books named in the order range from historical narratives of the region by well-known academics, historians and journalists, both from Kashmir and abroad, to documentation of human rights atrocities committed in Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarised territories in the world. The Kashmir region has been disputed by Indian and Pakistan since independence, with the two countries controlling parts of it.

Since the 1990s, Indian-ruled Kashmir has been home to a militant separatist insurgency and a long-running campaign by Indian forces to crack down on militancy has led to accusations of widespread abuses carried out with impunity including enforced disappearances, tens of thousands of killings and a crushing of freedom of expression under draconian laws. The Indian government has denied the accusations.

Roy’s book Azadi, which includes essays on the thousands allegedly killed and disappeared in Kashmir by Indian forces in recent decades, and Independent Kashmir by the Australian political scientist Christopher Snedden, which explores the Kashmiri fight for independence, were among the banned books.

Other titles the government ordered to be banned from publication and forfeited by all bookshops in the region included Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation by the US-based academic Hafsa Kanjwal and Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka by Sumantra Bose, a professor at the London School of Economics.

The government alleged that the content of the books “would deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism”. The order accused the works of glorifying terrorists, distorting history and promoting violence and claimed they had “contributed to the radicalisation of youth in Jammu and Kashmir”.

Authors named in the order expressed frustration at their works being censored in the very region they addressed. Angana Chatterji, a scholar at University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the now-banned Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, said the order “underscores the state’s intent to criminalise scholarship and render it seditious”.

“The symbolic and material impact of this ban stands to be extensive,” said Chatterji. “It restimulates psychological operations to terrify and isolate Kashmiris, and silence their pain and resistance.”

She alleged that the decree of censorship was part of a wider agenda by the Indian government to “erase the decades-long history of state violence, terror, and impunity in Kashmir”. The order, she added, had “signalled that it fears critique and will not tolerate the free exchange of ideas”.

Allegations of attacks on free expression and press freedom in Jammu and Kashmir have mounted since 2019, when the Modi-led government unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its decades-long autonomy and statehood, brought it fully under the control of the central government and began a widespread crackdown on dissent. In February, police in Kashmir raided dozens of bookshops and seized more than 650 books, alleging they promoted a “banned ideology”.

More than 10,000 books were banned in US public schools from 2023 to 2024, according to a report, marking a stark increase over the year before as Republican-led states pass new censorship laws.

The survey from PEN America suggested that bans of books nearly tripled nationwide, from 3,362 the previous year.

At least 13 titles were banned for the first time, including Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which describes the journey of an enslaved person from Africa to the US, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, the acclaimed semi-autographical work set in Harlem, New York.

PEN America, a non-profit organization dedicated to freedom of expression, said that approximately 8,000 instances of book bans took place in Florida and Iowa, as both states enforced sweeping laws targeting classroom material.

“State legislation was also particularly critical in accelerating book bans, making it easier to remove books from schools without due process, or in some cases, without any formal process whatsoever,” PEN America said.

Iowa’s law, signed in 2023, bans material about sexual orientation and gender identity before seventh grade. The legislation also explicitly bans books depicting sexual acts from K-12 libraries and classrooms.

In Florida, any book challenged for including “sexual conduct” is pulled while under review. Such guidelines have led to a sharp increase in book bans, PEN America reported.

Both states have faced lawsuits over the controversial laws.

Major publishers, LGBTQ+ teachers, students and parents sued to have Iowa’s law permanently overturned. But a federal appeals court overturned a temporary injunction on Iowa’s book bans, allowing the law to continue taking effect. Additional legal proceedings are expected.

Six prominent book publishers are also suing Florida over its “unconstitutional” book ban after hundreds of their titles were pulled from school libraries.

Utah, South Carolina and Tennessee have all recently enacted book bans as well. Utah, in particular, has one of the “most extreme” bills, PEN America said, referring to the law HB 29, which says a book must be pulled from all schools in the state if at least three districts have found the title to be “objectively sensitive material”.

Book bans have continued to overwhelmingly target stories focused on LGBTQ+ people and people of color, according to PEN America.

“In part due to the targeting of sexual content, the stark increase includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color,” it said.

It said it would release a final count on the number of banned books in the autumn.

Meanwhile, legal action has helped restore books in some municipalities. One Florida county brought back 36 books that were previously purged after settling a lawsuit from a coalition of parents, students and authors.