Sally Rooney's Books Are Gone From British Shelves. The Law Did That, Not a Censor.

Sally Rooney's novels are no longer being supplied to British booksellers, and the reason is narrower than the reaction to it suggests. Her publisher, Faber, has said that current legislation has led to circumstances where it cannot pass on U.K. earnings to Rooney for her work, and that to sell a writer's work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher. That is not a government ban on the books. It is not a retailer boycott. It is a publisher concluding that the ordinary machinery of publishing, the part where money moves from reader to shop to publisher to author, has become something it cannot legally operate.

The mechanism matters because it is easy to mistake for censorship. Rooney has publicly supported Palestine Action, a group the U.K. government has designated as a terrorist organisation, and she previously said she intended to use proceeds from her work to financially support it. Under U.K. terrorism law, public membership, support, or financial aid raised for a proscribed group is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. More than 3,700 people have been arrested in the U.K. for allegedly supporting Palestine Action since the group was banned last year. Rooney told BBC News that further publication of her work could constitute a serious criminal offence, and said she is wholly prepared to accept the consequences. Faber's statement is the other half of that sentence: if the author has said the money is destined for a proscribed group, the publisher cannot keep sending it and claim not to have noticed.

This is the law working as written. Parliament created an offence of financial aid to a proscribed organisation, and it did not carve out royalties, literary prestige, or the affection of readers. A publisher that knowingly passed U.K. earnings to an author who had announced her intention to direct support to such a group would be exposing itself, and arguably her, to prosecution. Faber has not been charged with anything, and neither has Rooney. No one needs to be charged for a company to read a statute and decline to walk into it. The withdrawal is a private decision taken under public law, and the law is doing precisely what it was designed to do.

The strongest case against this position deserves to be stated plainly. A law that effectively removes a bestselling author's work from an entire national market, without any charge or conviction, may punish readers and publishers far beyond the conduct the statute was meant to reach. Rooney has not been convicted of anything. Her readers in the U.K. did not choose her politics, and booksellers did not either. If the mere combination of an author's stated intent and a publisher's royalty obligation can empty the shelves, then the practical reach of counter-terrorism law extends into the ordinary commerce of literature, and the people who bear the cost are not only the author but everyone who wanted to buy a novel. That is a serious objection, and it is not answered by pointing out that no one has been arrested.

The answer is that the objection is really an argument about the statute, not about this withdrawal. If Parliament did not intend financial-aid offences to capture royalty payments to authors who announce support for proscribed groups, it can say so, and publishers will adjust. Until it does, the choice facing Faber was not between free expression and censorship. It was between passing money to an author who had said where she wanted it to go, and not doing so. Faber chose not to. The alternative would have been to keep selling the books and keep the earnings, which would have been a different kind of statement entirely.

It is also worth being precise about what has not happened. Rooney has not been charged or convicted of any offence. The government has not banned her books. Readers may still find them through imports or secondhand sellers, though the brief does not say whether they can. What has happened is that a publisher has stopped supplying them because it cannot lawfully complete the payment at the end of the chain. That is a collision between terrorism law, royalties, and free expression, and it is uncomfortable. But discomfort is not the same as censorship, and a law that produces a result Parliament did not fully anticipate is not thereby a law that has been misapplied. It is a law that may need amending. Until then, the shelves are empty because the money could not move, and that is the law doing its job.