Yes you read my blog post title right. Earlier this year "Go get your mothers and fathers" was changed in Roald Dahl's books to "Go get your parents." There is no way to sugar coat the recent censorship of Roald Dahl's children's books. His books have delighted readers worldwide with sales of 300,000,000 books. Titles include "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "Matilda", "James and the Giant Peach" and "The Witches." I have two co-authored books published and it is outrageous to imagine future generations going through my books and making hundreds of changes. We authors put a lot of work into each word and thought in our books. When Dahl wrote "Rudyard Kipling" in one of his children's books, that is meaningful. It is doubly outrageous to do that after an author's death.
Puffin Books, his publisher, have called in sensitivity readers, i.e. a cute/sly way of saying censors. Thank goodness many public figures including Salman Rushdie and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are speaking out against the censorship. I read Netflix bought the rights to his books so they are involved in this
This year the publishers made hundreds of censorship changes in Dahl's books, including removing "mothers and fathers" and changing that to "parents", and to describe Augustus Gloop the censors removed the word "fat" and changed it to "enormous." "Cloud-men" was changed to "Cloud-people" and to describe witches "Old hags" changed to "Old crows". A mention of Rudyard Kipling was removed and John Steinbeck substituted. What! Thus far the changes are only in the English language versions, the French publisher says they have no plans to make those changes. They did not say they never will, but at least they have no plans to do so.
Salman Rushdie tweeted "Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed." PM Sunak spoke against the Dahl censorship and said "It is important to preserve works of fiction and to not air brush them."
I imagine that people who approve of this censorship would want all of these offending words removed from ALL children's books, no point in just censoring one author. Replacing Rudyard Kipling with John Steinbeck is tampering with what Dahl wrote and is literary vandalism. I am a librarian, published author and freedom lover so this topic is dear to me. What think ye?
In sum, keep your hands off my words! And all author's words.