Abstract
In January 2013, Lawrence Wright’s expose on the Church of Scientology, Going Clear, was published in America by Michael Knopf publishers. Despite its significant sales and critical acclaim, it took three years before the book could be published in the UK by Silvertail, with significant edits to avoid potential litigation due to its supposed defamatory content – an example of what Judith Butler describes as ‘implicit censorship’. Similarly, in 2019, the Australian edition of Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill (first published in the US) was challenged, with The New York Times reporting that ‘lawyers for Dylan Howard, an executive with American Media, Inc., sent letters to Australian booksellers warning of ‘false and defamatory allegations.’ These examples illustrate that the transfer of non-fiction texts from territory to territory is not straightforward: the threat of legal action informs the decision-making – the communications, negotiations and alterations – around what is publishable in the shadow of defamation laws, which are particularly strict In the UK and Australia. This paper explores the impact of defamation law on non-fiction trade books that travel across territories by interrogating in-house editorial processes and the likelihood of editorial management, where the activities and workflow between authors and editors are reconstructed, if necessary. In doing so, the research asks: does the risk, explicit or implicit, of defamation action produce a significant chilling effect in trade non-fiction publishing, and what are the outcomes for readers?
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: Publishing Systems and the Transfer and Translation of Ideas
KEYWORDS
Defamation, Publishing, Editing, Authorship, Socio-legal
