Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Astrid Lindgren to Laurie Halse Anderson- Corriere.it

Banned books, corrected books, awarded books. At the Bologna Children’s Book Fair the categories can easily overlap creating alienating effects. As happened on Tuesday 7 March: while a panel internationally faced the various forms of censorship that politics, society and sometimes the publishing world itself put in place towards children’s books, in another space Laurie Halse Anderson was proclaimed winner of Alma 2023, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the most important recognition in the sector, together with Hans Christian Andersen.

American, author of various books, including Speak, released in English in 1999, published in Italy in 2009 by Giunti and in 2019 became a graphic novel for Castoro, Anderson talks about uncomfortable themes in his novels for teenagers that can scare adults. Books which, as she herself writes on her website, often end up on one of the lists of some association that asks for themremoved from school libraries without knowing its content. The reasons are the same for which the Alma jury awarded her, because she tackles uncomfortable issues with an engaging and touching style. The passion she puts into her writing touches the heart directly, said Boel Westin, chair of the judging panel. In the motivation, her style is defined as a dark and brilliant realism, which testifies to the importance of time and memory in the life of a teenager. Pain and anxiety, longing and love, social inequalities and gender are examined with stylistic acumen and frank humour.

Yet if you consult the list of 1,648 titles ended up on the ban in some American schools between July 2021 and June 2022, drawn up by Pen America, those of Laurie Halse Anderson are seen to be present with varying degrees of censorship. From that list started Barbara Marcus, president of Penguin Random House USA, moderator of a conference dedicated to censorship that brought together publishers, writers, scholars from various countries. Censorship in the United States has never been stronger, Marcus said noting that today there is a much more structured organization, nationwide, which comes mainly from the conservative right, to ask teachers, librarians, booksellers, the removal of titles considered dangerous: A worrying situation – says Marcus – which requires the development of new reaction strategies.

Strategies that perhaps also serve in the face of another theme: the rewriting of works of the past on the basis of today’s sensibility, trend that has been going on for some time but brought to the fore by the Roald Dahl case, at the center of another Tuesday debate in Bologna. If the writer Davide Morosinotto argues that for certain books, even classics, the choice between changing or disappearing (better to adapt a text than to forget it), Mariagrazia Mazzitelli, editor, with Salani, of the author of the Chocolate Factory, he has no doubts that Dahl doesn’t touch himself: to change it is to go against freedom.