libel Archives - Page 41 of 75 - Index on Censorship

"Would you want your wives and Taliban to read this?"

English PEN director Jonathan Heawood has an excellent piece in the Independent today on the libel case against Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad.

Jonathan wonders if this sets a worrying precedent on the use of real people in literature:

What would it mean for literature if all characters based on real people were removed from the record? No Buck Mulligan in Ulysses; no Sarah in The End of the Affair; no Casaubon in Middlemarch; no Zelda in Tender is the Night; no Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House; no Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Ottoline Morrell was cruelly satirised in both Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow and DH Lawrence’s Women in Love. Christopher Robin Milne hated living with the memory of his father’s classic books about a little boy and his teddy bear. Real people are scooped up by writers all the time. Literature does not respect the boundary between public and private; in fact, it is all about overstepping that mark.

There’s also the question of whether an author should be held responsible for the reaction, or potential reaction, of an audience (or potential audience).

That’s not to say that Seierstad has not broken an unwritten code of hospitality, or that the Rais family has not faced problems as a result of the book’s publication. Although Rais himself continues to operate a successful business out of Kabul, his first wife has sought asylum in Canada and other members of the family are now living in Pakistan. But is this discrepancy in the fates of the male and female members of the family the fault of a Norwegian journalist – or Afghan society? Is it appropriate for a Norwegian court to punish the messenger? Is a court of law the place to determine how a book treats the “honour” of an entire society?

The book-censor of Kabul

Author Åsne Seierstad has been found guilty of defamation after an Afghani family objected to her portrayal of them in her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul.

An Oslo court found that Seierstad’s book misrepresented the lives of the Rais family, whom she had stayed with as a guest in 2002.

What’s interesting here is that while the Rais’s have no assets or life in Norway, they were allowed to sue in a Norwegian court. But as Seierstad is Norway-based, and the book was published in Norway (and elsewhere) this doesn’t count as libel tourism, does it?

UK: First libel supreme court hearing

The first libel case in the new Supreme Court, Joseph v Spiller was heard on 26-27 July.

The case concerns Motown tribute act, the Gillettes, who sued after their former agent Jason Spiller posted on his website that the band were not professional and that they consider contractual terms and conditions to “hold no water in legal terms”.

William Bennett, representing Craig Joseph, a singer for the group who arranged their bookings, has argued that a “fair comment” defence should be rejected because the “comment” related to a false fact and no reference was made in the post to the truthful facts upon which the comment was based. In contrast lawyers for the agent, Spiller, contended that the false fact was not materially detrimental to Joseph and thus the defence should not fail. He further appealed to the justices to clarify and simplify the meaning of the “fair comment” defence, including renaming it “comment” to avoid misleading juries, since the defence protects both fair and unfair comments equally. A ruling, which could have serious effect on future definitions of fair comment, is expected in August or early September.