The festival organisers titled her speech: “Community and Belonging”, despite the fact that Shriver called it: “Fiction and Identity Politics”. The audience members who pitched up to hear about community and belonging got a bit of a surprise because Shriver came there to lay down the gauntlet and, as is her way, she did it like an elephant in a china shop. What Shriver had set her sights on was cultural appropriation and how it was being used to bully writers and, from her perspective, to censor them, or worse still to get them to censor themselves.
Writers on social media lost their minds, taking polarised sides. No one could stay neutral on the topic. Articles popped up on arts pages. Comment sections went insane. I am a fan of discussion, even discussions I do not agree with so I was happy about it all. In any case, there is a problem, though I do not think it is with writers and I do not think prescribing what writers can and cannot write will do anything to sort out the main underlying problem. The simplistic view to the complex problem, like all such simplistic views, will kill literature.
