Publishers fight back against US book bans

FRANKFURT - Escalating attempts to remove works featuring themes such as LGBTQ lifestyles and race relations from US bookshelves are facing growing resistance from publishers and rights groups, and was a major topic at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2025.

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Spearheaded by right-wing conservative groups, there has been an explosion in efforts to get books that are viewed as overly progressive banned in US schools and public libraries in recent years.

In 2020 just under 300 titles faced “challenges” — demands to restrict access to them or remove them entirely — across the United States, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

That number began surging the following year, and reached over 9,000 in 2023, said the nongovernmental organisation (NGO), whose office for intellectual freedom has been tracking challenges since 1990.

“It’s an ideological mission from people on the right,” Mr Jon Yaged — chief executive of Macmillan Publishers, whose books are among those that have been targeted in the US — told AFP.

“This is just the most recent instance of hate demonstrating itself in culture,” said Mr Yaged at the Oct 15-19 Frankfurt event, the world’s biggest book fair, where the subject was hotly debated.

It is part of what Pen International says is a growing global trend, with the literary freedom NGO reporting a “dramatic increase in book bans and censorship” in recent times, from Afghanistan to Russia.