London author Iain Sinclair has been critical of the London Olympics, and plans to destroy parts of the historic Hackney neighbourhood in favour of sporting complexes and the like.
His new book Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire was to be launched in 2009 at the Hackney Libraries. It got canned, because a) he wrote a critical piece about the Olympics, or b) because he is “controversial.”
From his piece in the Guardian:
Then, last Friday night, I had a call to say sorry, but the invitation was withdrawn. It seemed a diktat had come down from above that I was a non-person and should be barred from the library for the crime of writing an off-message piece on the Olympics. This essay, published in the London Review of Books, responded to aspects of the creation of the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley: the destruction of the Manor Garden allotments, the eviction of travellers, and the famous “legacy” revealed as nothing more than a gigantic shopping mall in Stratford.
The essay had very little to do with the book I was invited to launch. Challenged, the council shifted its ground: I was controversial. Controversy was not allowed in libraries. There could, presumably, be no discussion of stem-cell research or Afghanistan. And Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire fell into that category. A conclusion Hackney was miraculously able to reach without reading a line of a book that won’t be published for another three months [more...]
Depressing.
