Do you remember reading any books as a child that were in some way disapproved of or forbidden? If yes, did they traumatise you for life, or did the subversive element make them more enjoyable?
I was really lucky in that my parents definitely didn’t seem to have any kind of rules about what I couldn’t read. And that was wonderful, because it meant that whatever was on the shelves, if it was interesting, I could pick it up and I was allowed to read it.
I got in trouble at school: I remember having a copy of a book - called And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game by David Forrest - confiscated and only given back when I pointed out that it was my father’s copy and that he would like it back. It was a rollicking, slightly-bawdy spy novel.
But what mostly fascinated me was that nobody really seemed to notice or mind what I was reading. I was a 12-year-old reading my Michael Moorcock or reading Giles Goat Boy by John Barth or reading books which, looking back on it, definitely had content that I would not particularly have given to a 12-year-old.
I seem to have done just fine. Although there were definitely stories that I would bump into that I would find disturbing. I remember being disturbed by a Charles Birkin short story called the Harlem Horror, a weird little horror story that I probably ran into when I was seven or eight and I really wasn’t ready for it. But, mostly, I read whatever was around and learned whatever I could from whatever I could find.
I definitely haven’t been traumatised for life and I’m not entirely sure if the subversive element made things enjoyable. Except possibly in Chaucer and The Bible, where you’re actually discovering murder and masturbation – and you’re going “this is cool, this is subversive, because it’s the stuff they want us to read and they seem to have forgotten that it’s filled with stuff that they don’t want us to read.”
Why do you think it’s important for controversial books to be physically present in libraries and schools and not just available online?
Well, for a start, a lot of people are not online. And I think libraries and schools have a quality of serendipity - it’s the fact that something can look interesting from the cover, you can pick it up, you can hold it. I think that having physical access to a book, or at least to the content of the book, is huge and important. I think that sometimes the whole available-online-thing is a bit weird in that it can absolutely limit people’s access to books in a way that simply taking it off a shelf cannot.
Comic books and graphic novels often face the threat of being banned or removed from libraries. Why do you think people disapprove of this genre in particular?
Because they have pictures and because pictures are easy to ban; pictures can be devoid of context. It’s hard to upset people with just prose these days because you actually have to read it and you have to think about it and you have to understand it. It’s slightly easier to upset people with movies. But it’s really easy to upset them with comics and graphic novels because - just because there are pictures.
Partly, I think people automatically equate pictures with things for children and partly you get the kind of nonsense that happened this week, when a student at Duke University declined publicly and noisily to read Fun Home by Alison Bechdal - and he said he probably would have been able to read it if it was a novel - but the pornographic drawings would incite lust in his heart and thus he would be sent to hell. And you’re going, “well actually, if you read the book, there is no porn in this and it’s not what you think it is and if you read it, you would learn and you would be challenged and you would go to new places and I hope that maybe you’ll read a bunch of prose and grow up a bit. Grow up enough to be allowed to read comics”.
Do you ever deliberately include controversial scenes when writing for children to shock or provoke a strong response from the reader? Or do such scenes always arise naturally from the demands of the plot?
I’ve definitely never written a scene and gone “ha, this is controversial for kids”. I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever gone this is controversial with adults, possibly a couple of scenes in American Gods where I went “oh, this has probably lost me a few librarians and will get me off school shelves” but I didn’t really mind that – I figured that was a novel exclusively for adults and for smart, weird kids who go and grab the book themselves.
For me, when there are controversial scenes, they’re always intrinsic to the book and I hope always done tastefully. The Graveyard Book opens with a serial killer walking round a house, holding a knife, having just murdered three people and now looking for the baby, who he’s going to kill - and it’s probably as scary as it gets. But I tried to write it in such a way that different people reading it would get different things out of it. And was it put in to shock or provoke an effect? No! It was put in because that’s where the story has to start.
Have you ever felt guilty or worried about including graphic violence in a book you were writing for children - do you censor yourself?
I tend not to write graphic violence much anyway and when it’s there, I mostly want to make sure that people understand that graphic violence is a horrible thing. I don’t ever feel guilty or worried showing violence as violent and horrible and unpleasant. I do feel guilty trying to show violence as being easy, consequence-free and a lot like it is in movies.
Do I censor myself? The only time I think was when I was doing a book Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament of bible adaptations. I adapted a bunch of stories from the Book Of Judges for it and in my script for the artist, there is a scene where there is a particularly horrible rape and murder of two girls. I asked the artist to make it as horrible as it probably would have been - I said do not make this erotic, do not make it in any way sweet or nice; this is the people of a village raping two women and killing them at the end. The artist went overboard enough that he upset the people at the publishing house and they said “we are not prepared to publish this”. Another artist came in and drew a still unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as the last one, rape scene, illustrating a bible story. I think it’s interesting that the only thing of mine that we’ve actually gone in and just amended because it was too strong and too unpleasant was a literal telling of a story in the bible.
Let’s look at a specific example: the murder scene at the beginning of The Graveyard Book which has been criticised as disturbing and overly vivid. How would you defend including such scenes in a children’s novel?!
It’s interesting because it has been criticised as disturbing. I don’t know that it’s been criticised as overly vivid - it’s definitely never been criticised for being explicit, because it’s not. The opening scene, the opening four pages of The Graveyard Book, is mostly there in your head. While Jack has killed the family, what he’s done happens before the book starts and is not actually described in detail. I tried to write it in such a way that if you are following what’s going on, you are doing all the work in your head. If you remember vivid murders in the Graveyard Book, then I’m afraid you killed that family and not me because I never wrote it!
Some people in the US tried to ban the Sandman series because it threatened ‘family values’. Do you ever feel slightly proud that your writing is considered incendiary enough to be classed as a threat to established social conventions?
I tend to go backwards and forwards between feeling proud of Sandman and being ashamed of society. When I was writing Sandman I wasn’t putting the marginalised (gay people, transgender people) in to upset anybody; they were being put in because these were my friends, these were the people I hung out with– and they didn’t seem to be getting represented in most of the comics I was reading. That may seem incredibly disingenuous but I was absolutely baffled when the right wing the American Family Association and the concerned mothers of America and all of these kinds of people started coming out of the woodwork. I guess I’m even more baffled now because here we are, 25 years later, and the same people are saying the same stuff and I’m going “well, I could have sworn that 25 years ago, that this was not going to keep going with the same people”. But there they are and, they’ve been out there decrying the Lucifer TV series - a TV series they definitely haven’t watched - as being anti-biblical, which is really strange, because Lucifer is mentioned nowhere in The Bible as being the devil and the ruler of hell.
Can you tell us how you feel when people accuse your books of being ‘pornography’ and ‘garbage’, and ask for them to be banned? Upset? Angry? Confused? Amused?
Mostly resigned. There is sort of a “oh, here you go again… You are just still out here.” I don’t think I’ve ever written pornography and would see no shame in doing so. When people say that it’s garbage, you know, there is no accounting for taste. I have enough awards, I have enough critical plaudits, honorary doctorates, I’m a professor right now at Bard University in America, I have the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal and the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and all of this kind of thing - which is honestly kind of nice. I think if ever I did feel the urge to get up in the morning and go “I wonder if I do write garbage?”, I could go “well, for those people, obviously I do, but there’s enough people out there in the world who think I write good stuff and that’s good enough for me”.
Films are classified by age, and young children are prevented from seeing films that are classified as a 15 or an 18. Do you think this is unreasonable censorship? If not, why shouldn’t we have a similar system for books?
I think again it goes kind of back to pictures. Truthfully, I think that because people are, on the whole, rather better at censoring themselves when they read books. A long dull book that is dull for you when you’re 14-years-old may not be dull for you when you’re 22, but I don’t think you’re going to necessarily pick it up when you’re twelve and wade through a book that you may find dull.
I’ve never been terribly impressed by the whole age thing on the back of books - because they do it in America and, as far as I can tell, mostly what it does is simply dissuade people who might like a book from reading it either because they think they’re too young or, more often, because they think they’re too old. You know, you pick up Coraline and it says for age whatever it is, seven-to-12. and I know an awful lot of people over the age of 12 who love Coraline and I’ve known a few people under the age of seven or eight.
I think normally shelving helps, marketing helps, but putting rules on the back of books saying “when you are old enough” is probably a mistake. I used to like what they did in Sandman - the Vertigo comics - where they put “for mature readers” on it. And they didn’t try to define mature readers by age, they’re just letting you know these are not kid’s comics.
You said in a blog post a few years ago that you loved going to America in 1992 because the US guarantees freedom of speech in the First Amendment whereas there is no such law in the UK. Recently though, it seems that it is mostly in the United States that your books have been at risk of being banned. Do you think America is now more intolerant than Britain? Have your books been banned in any country other than the US?
Yeah, there’s been banning in other countries and specific things taken of the shelves. And there’s been books that couldn’t be published - I would get informed by a publisher that they would like to publish X but, you know, in whatever country this was not considered publishable. In fact, when we were talking earlier about the Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament, that wound up nearly sending a publisher to prison in Sweden for depiction of images of violence against women/ It was only, I think, when they pointed out that this really is in the bible, we didn’t make it up, that the publishers let it go.
In the US, there’s a lot of attempts to ban, there’s a lot of people who do not understand the First Amendment, there’s a lot of school principals who don’t understand that the have rules about what they can and can’t have taken off the shelves in libraries and there’s people who would be very very happy to have books and ideas removed. It’s one reason why I’m so ridiculously out there and donating serious amounts of money and a fair amount of time to the various anti-censorship organisations that are fighting that kind of stuff. For me, because I came from a world of comics, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which has been out there, fighting.
It’s not that I came to America and went: “harrah, harrah, harrah, this place has freedom of speech, no books will ever be banned”. It’s that I came out and went “harrah, harrah, harrah, this place has freedom of speech and they are absolutely trying to get books banned and they are prosecuting people.” You get cases more obscene than anything I know of in the UK in the US - Mike Diana in Florida, who went to trial for writing and drawing a sort of zine called Boiled Angel and his eventual conviction he was sentenced to, I think, a three year suspended sentence and a thousand hours of community service, a thousand dollar fine. He was not allowed to be within about twenty yards of anyone under the age of 18, which was rather a problem because he worked in a convenience store and if anybody who looked under the age of 18 came in, he had to leave, go in the back and have somebody else serve. He had to have psychiatric treatment at his own expense. And he was forbidden from drawing and the sheriff’s office were ordered to make 24 hour spot checks on his home, unannounced, just crash on into his little apartment to make sure he wasn’t drawing and flushing the pictures down the toilet.
And that kind of thing I just find absolutely obscene. But it was things like that that made me an activist. I love that the First Amendment exists and I think that it’s a terrific thing. I wish the UK had guaranteed freedom of speech - we don’t. I think we should. But it’s absolutely why I will support PEN, why I will absolutely and utterly keep being a First Amendment activist.
Do you think censorship is decreasing, or can you see new threats to freedom of speech on the horizon? If the latter, where are these threats coming from and how serious are they?
I think there are lots of threats to freedom of speech and I think that the strange cesspit that parts of the internet, can turn into is definitely something that never occurred to any of us before. The fact that upset people can go and shout and the shoutiness and that other people can see… you get some people interpreting freedom of speech as being freedom to harass, freedom to pile on and scream. And I guess it is, but I can absolutely see it being a threat. You know, it takes one angry person pointing people at one thing that upsets them and suddenly the internet is a hornet’s nest and I don’t think that’s good. Mostly I don’t think it’s good because it means people are having to not say what they think and the point of freedom of speech is that you should be able to say what you think, defend what you think, argue with people, disagree with people. All of that stuff is hugely important.
If you don’t like my work, that’s great and I think you should absolutely write a book saying why you don’t like my work - or write blog articles or write newspaper articles. Freedom of speech is a hugely important thing. And so is the freedom not to be a dick and the freedom not to make an idiot of yourself and the freedom not to be as unpleasant as you possibly can be. And these are all important.
• Neil Gaiman’s many amazing books are available at the Guardian bookshop, from The Graveyard Book, to Coraline to his cute Chu picture books with Adam Rex.
We’d also like to share a cartoon by Neil Gaiman’s old friend, and our children’s laureate Chris Riddell which he has made specially for Amnesty International to illustrate his event on Monday at Edinburgh Book Festival where he will explore the power of pictures to inform children and young people about human rights and the importance of freedom of expression (with Debi Gliori) - why a picture tells a thousand words (and there’s still time to book tickets!)
Chris Riddell drew this cartoon to show solidarity with imprisoned Iranian artist Atena Farghadani. Last August, 12 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards arrived at Atena’s home, confiscated her personal belongings, blindfolded her and took her to Tehran’s Evin Prison. She was arrested for her peaceful acts of political defiance, including meeting the families of political prisoners and for posting on Facebook a satirical cartoon she’d drawn that was critical of members of the Iranian parliament.
On June 1 2015, after a trial that lasted less than half a day and relied on evidence from lengthy interrogations conducted when Atena was in solitary confinement without access to her lawyer, she was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for drawing a cartoon depicting politicians in favour of a Bill which would roll back women’s rights in Iran with animal heads. One of the charges she has been convicted of is “insulting members of parliament through paintings”.
Her story has captured the imagination of festivalgoers at Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe as Amnesty International’s Scotland office have been campaigning throughout to gain support for their petition calling on Iran’s Supreme Leader and Head of the Judiciary to release Atena immediately. Find out more here
