The SoA Is Not Okay

When Orwellian justice becomes a Darwinian survival of the "wokest." The public and private internet dramas orbiting the Society of Authors and its chair, Joanne Harris.

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A U.S. style struggle session is raging around the Society of Authors, the UK trade Union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, and a newly leaked letter from Kate Clanchy is exposing the depths of it.

This August, author of Chocolat and current Chair of SoA Joanne Harris decided to use her twitter account to take digs at fellow author JK Rowling. After Rowling reacted to the news that Salman Rushdie had been stabbed multiple times, multiple men decided to tell Rowling she was “Next.”

Rowling was understandably upset and asked Twitter support to remove the men threatening her from the platform. This was just one among thousands of death and rape threats Rowling has received, many on the twitter platform including a recent post containing her address and a pipe bomb manual, and authorities got involved.

Harris decided to use this event to post a poll asking authors if they’ve ever been threatened, real or imagined.

Harris deleted the poll only to repost another one and a long thread detailing how she wasn’t attacking Rowling. Many found this less than believable as not only is Harris following a parody J “Karen” Rowling account which mocks the author as the “world’s most victimized multi-multi-millionaire,” she continued gleefully responding to other threads mocking Rowling with accusations that she was making Rushdie’s attack about her. It seems for some death threats are a laughing matter right up until the violence is materialized.

Others, like journalist and author Sarah Ditum, pointed out it wasn’t the first time Harris was less than “be kind” to authors who had been threatened:

Still more conflicts bubbled to the surface with writers getting grief from both Harris and anonymous accounts for expressing disagreement with Harris’ public behavior. See this thread by author Philip Hensher as one such example.

More formal responses came in the form of an open letter on Julie Bindel’s substack and direct statements from Rowling in the Times

“I find it impossible to square the society’s stated position on freedom of speech with Harris’s public statements over the past two years and stand in solidarity with all female writers in the UK who currently feel betrayed by their professional body and its leader.”

"An ‘ideal society’ would be the graveyard of human greatness.”- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Though in the States, I, like many who followed the attempt on Rushdie’s life and the subsequent treatment of Rowling, was aware of these public squabbles. What I could not have predicted was an anonymous account forwarding a post linking to a Dropbox containing Kate Clanchy’s letter to the Council, Staff, and Management Committee of SoA. The letter details the treatment former SoA President Philip Pullman and Clanchy received, both publicly and behind the scenes, from Joanne Harris, Nicola Solomon, Sunny Singh and others. It claims there is a serious issue with how public debates are blurring passed the lines of social media into the official operations of the Union against its own professed standards.

Last year Clanchy, who had won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 for her 2019 memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was attacked for that very same book with detractors calling it racist and ableist.

From the article linked above:

Writers such as Philip Pullman and Amanda Craig came to Clanchy’s defence, while authors of colour, including Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh, criticised her response and the award-winning merit of the book, and went on to receive racist abuse from social media users.

Though Clanchy agreed to revise portions of her memoir, she says she continually received an assault of demands for public apology with Harris herself instructing what to say.

The backlash against Clanchy spilled over into condemnation from Singh on the entire culture of SoA, specifically addressing Philip Pullman . Pullman, who has no qualms virtue signaling to women his dim immaterial definition of womanhood, has a tendency to respond on twitter as if he had just woken from a bad dream or walked in on a conversation and just started speaking. When a Rabbi condemned a trans individual, previously arrested for antisemitic graffiti, after being arrested for hitting women’s rights campaigners in the head with a military grade smoke bomb, Pullman replied, “I despise transphobia.”

It was this walking in without reading the room style that got him in trouble last year. On August 9th he was called out by Singh for responding to a tweet he assumed was about the Clanchy controversy. The next day, the 10th he made a public apology.

The SoA released their own statement , which quotes Singh’s tweet, called Inclusivity Across Publishing the day after Pullman’s public apology distancing the Union from Pullman.

But we are also a community, representing more than 11,500 authors of all types and from all backgrounds. However uncomfortable we might sometimes find it, we do not comment on what they should or should not write, draw, perform or translate. Philip Pullman is halfway through his second and final five-year term as SoA President. President is an honorary position only: he does not play any part in the governance of the SoA (Joanne Harris is the Chair of the democratically elected Management Committee, who set our strategic direction). Philip wrote his comments as an individual, not in the name of the Society of Authors.

This incident would lead to Pullman resigning as SoA President in March of this year after continued pressure that included Clanchy’s publisher Picador crumbling to the online mob and “parting ways” in January. Pullman was quoted saying:

“When it became clear that statements of mine were being regarded as if they represented the views of the society as a whole (although they did nothing of the sort, and weren’t intended to), and that I was being pressed by people both in and out of the society to retract them and apologise, I realised that I would not be free to express my personal opinions as long as I remained president. That being the case, with great regret and after long consideration I chose to stand down.”

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”-John William Gardner

Clanchy’s 20 paged letter, featuring appendices of relevant twitter receipts and articles, maps out in specific dated detail her assertions that an online mob, featuring sustained and persistent attacks carried out by Sunny Singh, Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh promoted by Joanne Harris, personally and as chair of SoA, led to the public destruction of her work and reputation. Clanchy, distraught over not only losing her publisher but both parents within this time period, hired private detectives to do forensic investigations to refute the claims that responding to criticisms of her book led to women of color being mobbed by white supremacist hate mongers. Her receipts show that persistent targeted harassment came solely from her critics and was endorsed by Harris, ignored by Solomon and created collateral damage leaving the SoA without a sitting President.

Singh described any effort of Clanchy to defend herself against claims of racism were “white women’s tears.” Clanchy on pg. 11 of her letter:

“Professor Singh was not, as I believed at the time, asking me on the evening of the 9th of August to apologise for having written a book she did not like. I believe she had a much more serious accusation in mind, and so did Joanne Harris. They had a specific meaning for ‘harm I had inadvertently caused’. They meant that I had caused Prof Singh and other critics to be racially abused online. They thought I had done this by appearing to be distressed. My distress was said to be ‘white women’s tears’, performatively shed to in order to have black people assaulted, in particular violence on Prof Singh. My effort aided by Sir Philip in the role of ‘white knight’. He was alleged to have links to the American ‘alt-right’ who were stirred by my plight, intensifying the attacks”

No evidence of Singh, or any other women of color involved, being targeted and abused is provided. As of writing this, Joanne Harris, who is not a woman of color, has not been accused of “white knighting.” Harris’ blog entry White Feminists I’m Looking At You was tweeted by Harris with the phrase “For the late crowd. Some Mistakes and What They Taught Me.” Clanchy took this as targeting her specifically, mocking her book title Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me. Harris deleted the tweet but told Clanchy to “practice self- care.” This came after Clanchy expressed she was struggling with suicidal ideations.

You can read the entirety of Clanchy’s Letter in the link below and draw your own conclusions. So far the SoA has not responded publicly but the inclusion of Singh’s tweets in an official announcement by the society is awfully damning that this was not just a public debate by random individuals over whether an author was in fact an award winning terrible ableist racist. There is a vacancy for President of SoA. Will someone like Singh take the honorary title? Would that be an indication of the changing landscape of literature/unions and a sign of the SoA’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion? Or will it be a sign that this was a struggle session where identity politics were used to defame and dethrone current leadership hoping the self described “victims” of award-winning literary violence could ascend in their stead?

Disclaimer: I live in the U.S. and am not connected to any unions or publications here or abroad. I do not know Kate Clanchy, Philip Pullman, Joanne Harris or any one else mentioned in this piece. I was given this by way of a simple DM “You seem like you don’t mind a bit of controversy.” It was an anonymous tip.

Speaking of tips if you appreciate my content please feel free to help me buy some hot Chocolat, I would like to keep my substack free and open to all:

“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”-Angela Davis

Here’s the full Dropbox link to Kate Clanchy’s letter to SoA