Authors irked by “sneering tone” of BBC book shows
A series of programmes screened by the BBC last month dedicated to World Book Night have come in for criticism from 85 of Britain’s top authors, including Iain M Banks and Michael Moorcock.
The writers' ire was inflamed by a perceived “sneering tone” adopted in the coverage given to commercial fiction, prompting the angry letter to Mark Thompson.
In it the signatories complain of the “shabby treatment of genre fiction” by the corporation, a move which they believe was “counterproductive to the night's aims of actually encouraging people to read novels.
Fantasy author Stephen Hunt, who organised the joint letter, complained of the “unbalanced” nature of the coverage, adding: “the failure to feature a single work from the three genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction was a disgrace.”
Hunt continued: “There have been weeks when one in three books sold in the UK were Harry Potter novels, or more recently, Twilight novels. The sweeping under the carpet of the very genres of the imagination which engage and fire readers' minds shows a lot more about the BBC production team's taste in fiction than it does about what the general public is actually reading."