Identity politics collars fiction

George Orwell would have liked the term, 'sensitivity readers' but as a journalist, he would have called them by their correct name – censors.

Under these dictates, books such as Thomas Keneally's, 'The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith', Graeme Simsion's, 'The Rosie Project', and even Charles Dickens', 'Bleak House', with a female narrator – and thousands more – would never have been published.

Publishing companies and literary agencies have long flown the flag for freedom of speech. Now, I fear, it's at half-mast.

Some argue that censorship is good for artists because it challenges their imagination.

Salman Rushdie wrote that this was like cutting a man's arms off and then praising him for learning to write with a pen held between his teeth.

Paradoxically, those who subject fiction to rigid ideological purity tests, have more in common with the doctrinaire Chinese Red Guards of the 1960s, who ruthlessly stamped out progressive thinking.

Works such as 'Clockwork Orange', 'Lolita' and the 'Tropic of Cancer', live in fear of censorship. These famous novels are extraordinary explorations of the darker corners of human experience.

I write short stories and I've had some minor success with publication.

I can often place a story by creating a morality tale, e.g., a refugee Iraqi doctor who saves a mother and baby in a breach birth in an outback town, winning the respect of the sceptical locals.

Yet most of my stories have ambiguous moral endings. The 'Ivory Hunters' was a story about Kenyan park rangers lying in the jungle, waiting to ambush a group of teenage Somali ivory poachers.

The story is told by the head ranger. He is a black man with a young family. He is worried because his fellow rangers are frightened and poorly trained.

The poachers walk along a moonlit path and just before the rangers shoot, a baby elephant walks in front of their line of fire. The poachers laugh, drop their weapons, pat the elephant and shoo it off the path.