Writer Anthony Horowitz hits out at cancel culture, saying novelists must be free to write what they want

Anthony Horowitz has hit out at cancel culture and insisted that novelists must be able to express views "without the world falling in on you".

The author and screenwriter, known for his series of Alex Ryder children’s novels and the TV programme Foyle’s War, claimed that “there is a sense of writers under siege at the moment” and pointed to attacks on JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author.

Rowling has received extensive public criticism for her views on transgender rights.

“JK Rowling is a gold-plated hero in the world who has done an enormous amount for children’s literacy and charity, and she is under attack," Horowitz said.

“Writers must lead the agenda, not be cowed into following it. You must be free to write what you want, and to express the views you want to express without the world falling in on you.”  

Speaking to The Sunday Times Culture magazine, he also said that he worried about creating characters from backgrounds different to his own for fear of a backlash.

“There are moments when I’m writing a character, who might be from a different ethnicity to mine, or a different sex or gender or background. I start worrying about what the reaction might be because it’s so unfathomable. And that is scary because writers shouldn’t be following the agenda, they should be setting it,” he said.

The author also admitted that the upcoming TV adaptation of his novel Magpie Murders included a black vicar in a rural English village despite it being “extremely unlikely that in the 1950s a village like Saxby-on-Avon would have a black vicar.”

The move was made, he said, as a concession to modern audiences. “You’ve got to have on one hand sociological, or social history accuracy, and on the other you’ve got modern television and what an audience expects. You have to steer yourself to one at the expense of the other.”

In 2017, Horowitz claimed to have been “warned off” writing a black character in one of his novels because he himself was white.

He said at the time: “This is maybe dangerous territory but there is a chain of thought in America that it is inappropriate for white writers to try and create black characters.

“That it is actually not our experience and therefore to do so is, by its very nature, artificial and possibly patronising.

“Therefore I was warned off doing it. Which was, I thought, disturbing and upsetting.”