4 Global Stories of Book Bans, Censorship, and Freedom

Posted on January 26, 2022

"Who told you to read such a book?" So says a teacher to the young Habibe Jafarian in her memoir-essay, "For the Love of the Books," which describes growing up as a book-loving girl in Iran's most religious city.

Given recent efforts to ban books in U.S. schools, which seem to be increasing, Jafarian's essay is newly relevant. Find more information on this issue in the essay's Context tab, and read more stories of censorship and freedom on WWB Campus from the list below:

• Mana Neyestani describes his own Kafkaesque experience of being thrown in prison for a single word.
• Egyptian cartoonist Magdy El Shafee takes on a repressive regime in "Two Million People in the Square."
• Below, Wenguang Huang discusses his work translating censored Chinese writers into English. You can find his work in the "Taboo Topics" section of our China collection.

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