Ian McMillan banned from creative writing workshop in the UK...

I just read this on another blog (An Awfully Big Blog Adventure: The ramblings of a few scattered authors) and thought I would share it. But whereas I would normally write a commentary with clips from articles or books, I will be refraining for today. The writer of this particular blog entry, author Ellen Renner, did a marvellous job and I feel I would be simply doing the writing injustice by trying to re-write was is already well written. The following is a segment of the blog entry, along with a link to the full commentary. I hope you will all read it and comment, either here or on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

Mr. Ian McMillan

Yesterday, as I was filing my income tax, someone emailed to tell me about Sheffield City Council's decision this week to ban Ian McMillan. For those who don't know about this, Mr McMillan, a poet, broadcaster and comedian, was scheduled to run a children's creative writing workshop at Upperthorpe Library in Sheffield. The event was intended to highlight the value of libraries to their local community, in a time when, as we all know, both school and public libraries face massive cuts. 

Apparently, the city council banned Mr McMillan because they feared that the event might be hijacked for the purpose of making 'political' comments. Hijacked by whom, or how, the article didn't make clear, but according to Sintoblog (sintoblogspot.com) the background to this is the fact that Sheffield council, although not currently proposing any library closures at present, is planning major cuts to the library budget which will have an inevitable knock-on to service provision. 

Read the rest here.

If you would like to read another rather enlightening post about opposition to libraries (though not necessarily with anything to do with censorship) you can read a very heartfelt speech by Philip Pullman here.

And as always, thanks for reading!