Meg Rosoff event cancelled over 'blasphemous' book

A Christian school has cancelled an appearance by Meg Rosoff, the award-winning children’s author, on account of her book's “blasphemous” content.

Rosoff said it was "disappointing that some schools feel that the subject of my book is unsuitable for their pupils"

By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor, The Telegraph, 27 Sep 2011

Rosoff’s latest novel for teenagers, There Is No Dog, is subtitled What If God Were A Teenage Boy?. It imagines God as a feckless, sex-mad 19-year-old called Bob who carries out Creation in six days because he can’t be bothered with a seventh, and spends most of his time dreaming about girls.

The author was due to join fellow children’s writers Melvin Burgess and David Almond at Monkton Combe independent school in Bath for an event that formed part of the Telegraph Bath Festival of Children’s Literature.

However, the school, which has a Christian ethos, withdrew its invitation after becoming acquainted with the book’s content.

Richard Backhouse, principal of Monkton Combe, said: “Parents in this part of south west England have a rich choice of schools. As a school, we take seriously our responsibility to honour the choice parents have made by providing an education which reflects our ethos.

“At the start of this term, we made the decision that hosting the author Meg Rosoff to talk about her latest book, There Is No Dog, and subtitled What If God Were A Teenage Boy?, was not an appropriate reflection of our ethos.”

Rosoff said she was disappointed by the decision.“I’ve been called blasphemous. Moi? I know. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” she wrote on her blog. In a statement, she went on: “I have never written out of a desire to be controversial. “It’s disappointing that some schools feel that the subject of my book is unsuitable for their pupils as I consider it part of my job as a writer to explore sensitive issues, and to let my adolescent readers find hope, humour and redemption in a world full of danger and loss.”

Penguin, Rosoff’s publisher, said it was “a great shame that a school would see fit not to give their pupils the opportunity to explore their beliefs and to engaged with such universal issues as religion with a hugely popular author of Meg’s calibre”.
Rosoff was born into a Jewish family in the US but has been “a complete atheist for as long as I can remember... the God that everyone talked about in the framework of religion always seemed silly to me”.