Fear of legal action leaves award-winning children's author Melvin Burgess looking for a new publisher for his latest story
Alison Flood writing in the guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 June 2009
Telling it like it is ... the novelist Melvin Burgess. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
He's courted controversy for more than a decade with his bestselling tales of underage sex and teenage heroin addicts, but Melvin Burgess has finally found a story too controversial for his publishers to handle: his own.
The Carnegie medal-winning author, whose new novel, Nicholas Dane, tackles the subject of sexual abuse in children's homes, has found a recently-completed teenage memoir dropped by his publisher over fears that it could provoke costly legal action.
"I'm always getting asked 'is this you in this book?'" said Burgess, "so I thought I'd say what I'd done. It was also a good way of looking at what it's like being a teenager. I did it, it was finished, and my publisher at Andersen Press was happy with it. Memoirs don't sell as well as fiction, but it was all sorted, but then they had it read for libel."
It turned out that the book fell foul of the privacy clause of the European convention on human rights, and there were concerns that it could provoke a host of challenges from people written about in the book. "It's about what I got up to and thought about when I was a teenager – friends of mine I smoked joints with ... some of those games of 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine', gropes in the broom cupboard," Burgess said. But "some of those boys you might have had a joint with, or ripped a car aerial off with, might be members of the Conservative party, and the girls might be respectable grannies", neither of whom would be likely to welcome having their teenage years exposed by an author.
Read Flood's full story at the Guardian online.
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