“Be brave. Screw the lot of them,” said Ian McEwan this week.
He was speaking on the subject of authors fearing causing offence, and of his bafflement at the rise of the sensitivity reader in fiction publishing. What they do is complex and varied, but to grossly simplify it, it is often the practice of asking a person from a community from which the author does not hail to check over a work which references or depicts that community in some way, so as to avoid cocking it up and causing a furore.
