Censorship or evolution? ‘Sensitivity readers’ divide publishing world FMTNews FMTLifestyle
WASHINGTON: It’s a profession that is increasingly under the spotlight as the culture wars rumble on: “sensitivity readers” – editors who identify insensitivities or stereotypes in manuscripts – are becoming a lightning rod for the publishing industry.
Publishers “are doing a damn good job, trying to ruin our books, and to ruin our fun as readers”, the American author of “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, Lionel Shriver, complained on ultra-conservative British channel GB News in February. “People say that, but I don’t feel that they understand the process,” Patrice Williams Marks, a Los Angeles-based sensitivity reader, told Agence France-Presse.
Mostly, they are freelance editors, often paid by the word or number of pages – and with strict confidentiality clauses, of course – by authors or publishers concerned about the accuracy of their manuscripts. “There are good reasons for regulating children’s reading: It is foundational and formational,” British author Kate Clanchy wrote in 2022.Adults “are able to put books down if they upset them, so their books may safely contain difficult ideas”, argues Clanchy, who was herself at the centre of a sensitivity reader controversy when her memoir was accused of being racist and insensitive.
In France, a country widely resistant to this type of revisionism, the essayist Raphael Enthoven in 2020 denounced these “modern censors” as “the vanguard of the Identity Plague”.But many other writers are in favour of readers – like the American Adele Holmes, who called on Marks’ services for her first book, Winter’s Reckoning.
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