Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, has warned that “politically correct censorship” risks turning the world of fiction into a “timid, homogeneous, and dreary” place, and called on her fellow novelists to take a stand against it.

Writing in March’s issue of Prospect magazine, Shriver said that authors in today’s “call out” culture are “contend[ing] with a torrent of dos and don’ts that bind our imaginations and make the process of writing and publishing fearful”. She provoked outrage in 2016 when she said in a keynote speech at the Brisbane writers festival that she hoped “the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad”. Almost two years later, she has now written that “preventing writers from conjuring lives different from their own would spell the end of fiction”, because “if we have the right to draw on only our own experience, all that’s left is memoir”.

According to Shriver, the “taboo” around cultural appropriation has become a “far bigger issue in literature” than it was when she first took on the issue. She pointed to the “sensitivity readers”, who are hired by publishers to look for what she called “perceived slights to any group with the protected status once reserved for distinguished architecture”, and to the “own voices” writers at Kirkus Reviews who review titles that have characters from their own particular background.

“These days, straight, white fiction writers whose characters’ ethnicity, race, disability, sexual identity, religion or class differs from their own can expect their work to be subjected to forensic examination – and not only on social media,” she said.

The Orange prize winner went on to highlight the propensity for umbrage to be taken in the modern age, citing cases including the decision by Black Lawrence Press in 2014 to drop Elizabeth Ellen from an anthology after she published a controversial essay elsewhere; the recent withdrawal in Minnesota of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird from classrooms, over fears the classics could “marginalise” and “humiliate” students; and her own experience of including a black character in a short story in late 2016, against the advice of her agent, who told her to replace the character with a white one. The story was declined by a magazine that Shriver said had published her in the past.

Shriver highlighted her own feelings – as someone with a self-cited “obstreperous streak a mile wide” – as now “more hesitant to fold a range of ethnicities, races, gender variants and classes into my work”, and her fears that unless she “push[es] back” against this, her “fictional worlds will fail to reflect the world I live in”.

“I’ve plenty of recent experience of using non-white characters in my novels, only to have them singled out and scrutinised for thought crime,” she wrote. “If even writers like me are starting to wonder if including other ethnicities and races in our fiction is worth the potential blowback, then fiction is in serious trouble.”

She said that it was “impossible to gauge the degree of politically correct censorship going on behind the scenes at publishing companies and literary agencies”, with authors whose work is rejected “left with uneasy suspicions about why their manuscripts might be attracting no takers, but with no hard evidence”. Conversely, she said that it was “equally impossible to gauge … the extent of writers’ collective self-censorship”.

“The tetchiness and public shaming of ‘call out’ culture has to be influencing which subjects writers feel free to address and which they shy away from, as well as making many writers reluctant to include a diverse cast,” she wrote. “Rather than tiptoe through this minefield, plenty of writers must be playing it safe with characters, topics and plots that won’t get them into trouble.”

She pointed to a piece in the Guardian following her comments in Australia, that saw contributions from, among others, Kamila Shamsie and Hari Kunzru, and was, according to Shriver, packed with “equivocation”, with Philip Hensher the only writer “willing to defend their liberty without a snowstorm of qualification”.

Shriver warned that “if all modern literature comes to toe the same goody-goody line, fiction is bound to grow timid, homogeneous, and dreary”, and called on her fellow authors, and on the book industry, to make a stand.

“The whole apparatus of delivering literature to its audience is signalling an intention to subject fiction to rigid ideological purity tests, unrelated to artistry, excellence and even entertainment, that miss the point of what our books are for,” she wrote. “Let’s see a little more courage, people – in the work and in the world.”