13 May 2025 | Americas, Canada, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Statements, United Kingdom, United States
Margaret Atwood has won the prestigious Freedom to Publish award at the British Book Awards 2025, as announced at a gala last night held in central London. A long-time Index contributor, Atwood is known for her tireless support of freedom of speech. Today – an era marked by the rollback of women’s rights, the global rise of populism, and increasing threats to diversity, freedom of thought and expression, which can and often does manifest in the banning of books – her voice resonates with a clarity and urgency that is both profound and timely.
In a video acceptance speech, Atwood said: “I cannot remember a time during my own life, when words themselves felt under such threat. Political and religious polarisation, which appeared to be on the wane for parts of the 20th century, has increased alarmingly in the past decade. The world feels to me more like the 1930s and 40s at present than it has in the intervening 80 years.
“I have worked as a writer and in my youth in small press publishing for 60 odd years. Those years included the Soviet Union, when Samizdat was a dangerous method of publishing. Hand-produced manuscripts were secretly circulated, and bad luck for you if you were caught. [They now include] the recent spate of censorship and book banning, not only in the oppressive countries around the world, but also in the United States. [They also include] the attempt to expel from universities anyone who disagrees with the dogmas of their would-be controllers.
“This kind of sentiment is not confined to one extremism or the other – the so-called ‘left’ or the so-called ‘right’. All extremisms share the desire to erase their opponents, to stifle any creative expression that is not propaganda for themselves, and to shut down dialogue. They don’t want a dialogue, they want a monologue. They don’t want many voices, they want only one.”
Atwood ended her speech wishing publishers “strength and hope”, adding: “In a free world publishers and booksellers stand for the many. If free governments and the free human intelligence are to survive, the guardians and transmitters of words in all their multiplicity must be brave. I wish you strength and hope, and the courage to withstand the mobs on one hand and the whims of vengeful potentates on the other.”
Channel 4 News’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum, who presented the award to Atwood, said: “When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale I thought it was a dystopian fantasy. Then I learnt that every idea was based on evidence of how women have been oppressed – it was fiction, but not really. The book was in itself an act of resistance, just one example of how Margaret Atwood has always stood at the forefront of the literary world as a tireless advocate for reading as a form of rebellion. Using her powerful voice and her fame, she has consistently championed justice, fairness, and freedom of speech – principles that feel more vital today than ever before.”
The British Book Awards has been the leading awards for the UK book trade since they began in 1990. The Freedom to Publish Award, which is presented in partnership with Index, has been running for four years. It pays tribute to the remarkable efforts of the individual in defending free expression and the freedom to read, write and publish, while also shining a spotlight on the growing and concerning trend of censorship within the global literary community. Previous recipients include Georgian-Russian author Boris Akunin, who is the most banned writer in Russia since Soviet times and Booker Prize-winning novelist Salman Rushdie, while in 2022 the award recognised the fortitude and bravery of HarperCollins and its editor Arabella Pike when facing legal threats (SLAPPs). Atwood is a long-time supporter of Index, a patron of the organisation and a contributor to the magazine. In the USA, her book The Handmaid’s Tale frequently appears in the top 10 most banned books from school libraries.
Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO at Index, said of choosing Atwood: “Censorship is on the rise around the world and where do censors so often begin? With culture. Yet there are voices that have consistently stood firm in defence of free expression. One of the most powerful of them is Margaret Atwood. Atwood has long used her extraordinary talent and global platform to champion this fundamental right. Whether through her writing, her public advocacy or acts of bold creativity – like the unburnable edition of The Handmaid’s Tale – she confronts repression not with fear but with wit and clarity. I can think of no more deserving a recipient of the Freedom to Publish award this year than her. Atwood has shown, time and again, that imagination remains one of our most potent tools against small-mindedness.”
Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of judges at The British Book Awards, added: “Books are the visible representation of the values we hold dear – freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom from authoritarianism. From east to west, our writers are now challenged, coerced and threatened in ways we thought were being consigned to history. Margaret Atwood and her books stand against that, and we are delighted she has accepted this award at a ceremony that has felt steeped in the politics of the times.”
Many books recognised at the British Book Awards 2025 reflected the urgency of political challenges faced today in the minds of both writers and readers. US novelist and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett won the Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year for James, Everett’s bold reimagining of Huckleberry Finn. Meanwhile Patriot by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was chosen by judges as Overall Book of the Year and was accepted by Navalny’s widow Julia Navalnya. She said:
“This book was never meant to be published after Alexei’s death, Alexei wrote it with all the strength, wit and honesty that defined him. He wrote in secret from a prison cell under the most brutal conditions with no access to books, to the internet, to anything but his own memory and will. And yet he created a manuscript that speaks with clarity and conviction not only about Russia, but about freedom, justice and what it means to remain human. After he was killed, publishing this book became more than a responsibility – it became a mission. I worked closely with his editors and friends to preserve every word, every sentence, just as he intended.
“I’m profoundly grateful for the compassion and solidarity with which readers around the world have embraced it. Receiving this award from across the book community is a powerful recognition of the strength of Alexei’s voice. It tells us that truth still matters, that integrity matters, that words can break through even the hardest walls and reach hearts everywhere.”
Navalnya added that “Patriot is not just the story of one man’s life. It’s a book about love, truth, and the unshakable belief that Russia can be free.”
5 Oct 2023 | Uncategorized
Beijing Coma – Ma Jian
In the lead up to the Beijing Olympics, when China was on a global charm offensive, Ma Jian’s book Beijing Coma was published. Through the central character Dai Wei, a protester who was shot in Tiananmen Square and fell into a deep coma, Ma presented the other side of the country, an insecure nation afraid of its past and struggling with its present. Ma stated that he wrote the book “to reclaim history from a totalitarian government whose role is to erase it”. I raced through it, went to several book talks he gave and, given the epic proportions of the novel, even enquired about buying the film rights. They were available but I was told that was because few studios would dare take on a work so confronting. To this day the book remains banned in China and no film of it has yet to be made. We are the worse off for that. Jemimah Steinfeld
Are you there God? It’s me Margaret – Judy Blume
As the only child of an amazing single parent, books were a core feature of my childhood. A trip to the library was a joy and visits to the bookshop were a special treat. Getting lost in the pages of a book every night was my happy place and my favourite author as a teenager was Judy Blume. Blume writes beautifully and takes the reader on a journey of exploration of a teenage mind – helping you realise you aren’t alone in being challenged by new experiences and feelings. While from an Index perspective I should say that my favourite book was the one most banned – Forever (which I loved), my absolute favourite was actually Are you there God? It’s me Margaret. As the only Jewish kid at my school I related to Margaret’s internal conflict and her personal relationship with G-d. Blume remains a personal heroine and every effort to ban her books confirms why the work of Index on Censorship is so important. Ruth Anderson
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – DH Lawrence
I had to read DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover at school. I hated it. But I did enjoy the ironies that the attempted prosecution of it for “obscenity” totally undermined the state of the obscenity laws at the time and the court case reaffirmed art’s freedom to say pretty much anything it liked, as long as it was judged to be of literary merit (whatever that means). Those who tried to suppress the book only succeeded in fanning the flames of public interest exponentially, beyond who might otherwise have read it without all the hoo-ha and salacious interest whipped up around it. Public interest was the other marker of whether the book should be permitted, so in bringing the prosecution it rather ensured the inevitable failure of the case. The trial has also been highlighted as the start of societal values changing and ushering in the more permissive 1960s. None of this impacted on DH Lawrence, since he’d been dead for 30 years. Publishers had self-censored by holding off publication until Penguin Books took the plunge and British society was probably never the same again. Now, if only a book could have such a societal impact in the 21st century… David Sewell
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses was the subject of a fatwa issued by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, which called for the assassination of its author, Salman Rushdie. The novel is Rushdie’s masterpiece: a comic take on the life of Muhammad that also wraps in the British Indian immigrant experience, Bollywood, Sikh separatism and Hinduism. Its ambition is vast and it deserves to be celebrated as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Its legacy will live well beyond the regime which forced its author into hiding. Martin Bright
Spycatcher – Peter Wright
I was at university in London when Peter Wright’s Spycatcher was first published and Margaret Thatcher’s government banned it. Wright was a former assistant director of MI5, who was annoyed about the security service’s pension arrangements and decided to blow the whistle over its shadier activities in order to recoup some money for his retirement in Australia. In the 1980s, the workings of the security services were shrouded in secrecy and the book caused huge ripples with its stories of Soviet moles and the then advanced technologies that were being used to spy on Britain’s ‘enemies’. I still remember reading the first chapter and finding out that a nondescript building around the corner from my university department I passed every day was used by MI5 for its covert operations. As the book was not banned in Australia or Scotland, its contents gradually leaked and Thatcher’s government was forced to admit defeat and the book ban was dropped. Mark Stimpson
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Look on the shelves of certain school districts in Texas, Michigan and Florida and you’ll find an empty space where The Handmaid’s Tale used to be, after book challenges led to its removal. Atwood’s most famous book might have been published in 1985, but it still has the power to scare self-appointed censors today. The graphic novel, too, is just as excellent and just as hated by censors. In the dystopian Gilead patriarchal structures are taken to the absolute extreme. A woman’s body is not her own – she is judged by her capacity for baby-making. Even her vocabulary is closely monitored. But the way this society was created is even more concerning, with events in the novel inspired by real-world happenings. It’s a book worth reading again and again – it hit home differently when I was a wide-eyed student to how it does now that I’m a mother, and still sends the same chill in a 2023 context. Katie Dancey-Downs
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird explores complex themes of race, justice, and humanity, bringing a degree of warmth to heavy subject matter by using the perspective of child protagonist Scout Finch to invoke a sense of innocence, even while tackling difficult topics. Although the book is considered a modern classic, it has been subject to bans and challenges due to its use of profanity, racial slurs, and adult themes. The language and subject matter may make it an uncomfortable read for some, but the overriding message of tolerance and morality is both important and necessary. Daisy Ruddock
Animal Farm – George Orwell
There’s always a book you read that, when you reflect back on, has made an impression on your whole life. For me it was Animal Farm by George Orwell. I first read the book as a teenager and it made me think about the meaning behind the role of governments and the issues of right and wrong, greed and the corruption of power. When I watched the world news and saw the power and restrictions that states placed on their citizens, a book published in 1945 showed me how the world turns and how little change there can be without true democracy. Cathy Parry
His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman
The His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman made its way to me through my grandmother. This was how I often got the books that have stuck with me nearly two decades later. I wonder whether she knew what she did would be so frowned upon by those in the US states who took offence to its apparent “anti-Christian” message? His Dark Materials is glorious collection of young adult books, which snuck in complex messages without patronising the readers. In fact, it challenges and provokes the readers in a manner that sent my teenage brain racing. Also how can you not love a polar bear wearing armour? Nik Williams
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The Ireland that I was born into was a cold house for women. There was no access to abortion, no divorce and marital rape had only recently been outlawed. Since then, public opinion has been reshaped and laws have been liberalised, largely as a result of ordinary women speaking out about their personal experiences. That’s why The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is important. It’s a rare example of a canonical work about the life of a young woman as told in her own words. The semi-autobiographical novel, which was previously banned in Ireland and remains banned in some US states, is a coming-of-age story following a young woman at odds with 1950s US society. It challenges the conventional roles of women and explores the difficult, and still tabooed, subject of mental illness. Jessica Ní Mhainín
28 Jul 2023 | News and features, Opinion, Ruth's blog, United States
In a world of online book shopping most of us rarely consider what we’re able to buy, or what books are available from the library. But there is nothing more important in the world of freedom of expression than access to the written word.
Literature can be an escape from reality. It can provide space to dream and to challenge and the best of literature can challenge our perceptions of the status quo. Of course there are bad books as much as there are good books, but each and every published work adds something to our collective understanding of the world around us. That’s why a democracy should cherish the written word and consider libraries as cathedrals of learning and opportunity. The banning of books is for the unenlightened and should be challenged wherever it happens.
And that’s why it is so shocking that 1,648 titles are banned across the United States at the moment, according to PEN America, in their recently updated list of banned books. Many of these books relate to sexuality and LGBTQ+ experiences, and some challenge historical realities, such as segregation and class, or race and history. With these books banned, not only are authors literally being cancelled but minority communities are prevented from seeing characters like themselves in the literature that they read.
The most commonly banned book in the USA at the moment is Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. What does this say to young people who are questioning their own identity when books which explore the very things that they are currently experiencing are banned?
As a Jewish woman and an anti-racist activist I find the concept of banning books abhorrent. Only those political leaders who are scared of people can possibly think it’s acceptable to ban the written word and make reading an illicit or illegal activity.
I was lucky as a child. I had an enlightened mum who thought there was little else more important than me reading, although I did resent getting the books about my favourite toys rather than the actual toys (yes mum I am still upset I never had a My Little Pony!). But looking at the list of Banned Books PEN America has published I’m disconcerted to see so many of those books I loved as a child banned, including several by Judy Blume and The Handmaid’s Tale by Index patron Margaret Atwood.
Freedom to read is as crucial an element of freedom of expression as freedom to create.
Censorship doesn’t protect children and young people. Reading about gender and sexuality isn’t going to make them go and have sex, or change who they might later choose to have sex with. Just as reading about Afghanistan doesn’t make a child a victim of war or reading about slavery in the USA a slave. Instead reading about those issues can make a young person more compassionate, more understanding of others and more open to new ideas. It generates empathy and gives us all a more informed and confident community who understand pain and anguish as well as our collective history. That is the society I want to live in.
And in the spirit of Barack Obama, who just released his own summer reading list in support of anti-book banning efforts, might I recommend you check out some of those wonderful titles on the list. Together let’s fight book bans.
25 Mar 2019 | News and features, Press Releases
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Inspired by our friends Book-ish in Crickhowell, Index on Censorship and VINTAGE are coordinating a nationwide series of publication-day celebrations and midnight openings at independent bookshops across the UK as part of Banned Books Week UK to celebrate the publication of Margaret Atwood’s highly anticipated The Testaments (sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale) on 10 September.
Host a midnight opening on the evening of 9 September or publication-day event on 10 September in your bookshop
We would like to support all independent bookshops marking the publication of The Testaments. You could open your doors after hours to booklovers on publication night, and, as the clock strikes midnight, sell copies of The Testaments. Or perhaps you could host celebrations on publication day – you could ask a local author to take part in live readings or a discussion, run a feminist banned-book quiz, have a The Testaments themed party or stage an anti-Gilead protest. Index and VINTAGE will provide you with POS materials (promotional posters, badges and tote bags) for window and in-store displays.
Go BIG – win £750 from VINTAGE to host your event
Do you have an exciting event idea? An attention-grabbing PR stunt? Fancy running a handmaid procession through the streets or creating your own Mayday resistance squad? Go as BIG as you dare – send us a brief event pitch, no more than 1 side of A4, outlining what you want to do, how you want to do it and how much you think it will cost to: [email protected], with the subject line ‘The Testaments publication celebration’. The deadline to apply is 30 April and we will let you know if your application has been successful in May.
The Handmaid’s Tale (re)read
With just under 6 months still to go until The Testaments is published and Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale on the horizon, we’ll be celebrating the dystopian classic throughout the month of May, and we’d love you to join in. Run your own The Handmaid’s Tale book club, invite a local author to chair a discussion, or create a Handmaid-themed display. We will be providing reading-group packs to guide your events and posters to display.
How to get involved
To let us know that you are planning events for either The Testaments or The Handmaid’s Tale, to make sure your bookshop is listed on the Banned Books Week website and interactive map and to request POS materials and reading group packs, please contact: [email protected]
To enter to win £750 to fund your attention-grabbing activity, please contact: [email protected] by 30 April 2019 (see instuctions above)
Please order your copies of The Testaments (9781784742324), RRP £20.00, from your local PRH Territory Manager, your preferred wholesaler, or direct via TBS Sales on 01206 256161
[Please note, reading or opening the book before midnight (00.01 on 10 September) is STRICTLY UNDER EMBARGO. You will be asked to sign a strict non-disclosure agreement about the contents of the book before receiving deliveries. Thank you.]
About The Testaments
When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead.
With The Testaments, the wait is over.
Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
‘Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.’ Margaret Atwood
Sign up to The Atwood Diaries newsletter for breaking news about the book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/margaretatwood
About Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam Trilogy. Her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against him; and the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. Sales of the English language edition have now topped 8 million copies worldwide.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
About VINTAGE
VINTAGE publishes some of the greatest writers and thinkers from around the world and across the ages – from Philip Roth, Yuval Harari, Haruki Murakami and Alice Munro to Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson and Salman Rushdie. Writers who have invented new worlds and explored our own; who have captured imaginations and won dozens of prizes, from the Nobel and the Booker to the Pulitzer and beyond.
Born in New York in 1974 and moving to London in 1990, VINTAGE is also famed for its beautiful, stylish design and brave innovation. The publisher comprises nine imprints, each one as distinctive as its own past: Jonathan Cape, Bodley Head, Harvill Secker, Chatto & Windus, Hogarth, Yellow Jersey, Square Peg, VINTAGE Paperbacks and VINTAGE Classics.
About Index on Censorship
Index on Censorship is a nonprofit organisation that fights for free expression and defends against censorship worldwide through an award-winning magazine, regular events and advocacy. Founded in 1972, Index has published work by censored writers and poets including Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller; Nobel Prize Winning authors Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soykinka; contemporary writers and campaigners including Ian Rankin, Lily Cole, Hilary Mantel and of course Index Patron Margaret Atwood.
More information: www.indexoncensorship.org
About Banned Books Week UK
Banned Books Week UK (22-28 September 2019) is a week-long celebration of the freedom to read co-ordinated by Index on Censorship in partnership with literary and freedom of expression organisations in the UK including the Booksellers Association. Banned Books Week was initiated by the American Library Association (ALA) in 1982 in response to an increasing number of challenges in the US to books in schools, libraries and bookshops. The ALA lists The Handmaid’s Tale as number 37 out of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.”
More information: www.bannedbooksweek.org.uk
