Ian McEwan has expressed his opposition to sensitivity readers, accusing young people of wanting “to bind their arms and legs in ways that are just trivial”.
Speaking to the international news agency AFP in Paris, the Booker-winning novelist expressed disdain at the practice of hiring someone to read a manuscript before its publication in order to point out things that might be offensive to readers. “These mass hysterias, moral panics, sweep through populations every now and then. And I think this is one of them,” he said.
The 75-year-old believes that support for sensitivity readers comes largely from “very young people who are living in societies that are relatively free” – but not a view that all young people have. He described sensitivity reading as “a weird thing that happens in some universities, which we got from the United States”.
Having reportedly heard a young male writer talk about his fear of writing about male desire, he thought: “‘Poor guy!’ Because you’ve lost the desire of half the world.”
He would advise this writer and others feeling scared to write things that might be offensive to “be brave” and “screw the lot of them”.
“You’ve got to write what you feel. You must tell the truth,” he said.
Following posthumous changes made to the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming earlier this year, debates about whether such edits are an act of censorship have become increasingly prominent, with a number of authors proclaiming their position on the issue. We Need to Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver has been a longstanding opponent of sensitivity readers, saying that she would rather quit writing than use one. Meanwhile Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh said that while he was initially dubious about using one for his 2022 novel The Long Knives, which features transgender characters, the reader he worked with was “brilliant” and the experience “did make the book better”.
In an interview with the Independent earlier this year, McEwan said he had never used a sensitivity reader himself: “I keep reading about it, but I seem to have escaped that particular whipping.”
Though the Atonement author made his disapproval of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” clear to AFP, he does not take this view when it comes to calls for racial and post-colonial reckoning. In 2020 he backed the students who tore down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, he pointed out.
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“Demanding a little more accounting of our colonial imperial past is a perfectly good demand,” McEwan said. “But saying we can’t read Nabokov or Conrad or whatever, seems beyond contempt”.
Young people fighting to combat the climate emergency also have his full support, the writer told the news agency, as that issue “is going to affect every last one of us”.
McEwan was visiting Paris for the French publication of his 18th novel Lessons, which he described in a Guardian interview last year as “a sort of post-Brexit novel”. He told AFP that he sees Brexit as a symbol of the defeat of an older version of Britain, of “teachers, doctors, librarians … people working in the public service [who] no longer count because Britain is really ruled by people who have made vast amounts of money in financial services and the social good is not of interest.”
“I think they’ll be back,” he added. “The wheel will turn again. We’ve seen too many of the stupid, shameful episodes of the populist right in our country.”
McEwan’s writing career has spanned more than 40 years, and through his fiction he has explored a number of complex issues, from the climate emergency in Solar (2010) and artificial intelligence in Machines Like Me (2019) to child sexual abuse in Lessons (2022). Several of his books have been adapted into films, most famously On Chesil Beach, Enduring Love and Atonement.
When asked about his chances of winning the Nobel prize in literature, to be announced on Thursday, McEwan was dismissive. “You know, there are about 50 of us whose names come up every year,” he said. “I think my son (a medical researcher) will get the Nobel Prize before me”.
