So what would they do to people who complained about the council's stewardship of swimming assets. Local author banned from the borough's libraries for having opinions. ...

"A warning to any innocent Hackney writer: question the coming triumph of the 2012 Olympics and, like me, you could achieve the dubious glamour of becoming a banned author. ...

... Hackney Libraries invited me to come back in February 2009 to launch a book I had been working on for more years than I care to remember: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. I was happy to accept, believing that a work researched, contrived and constructed in this place should have its first reading right here. A small return on my part for 40 years of madness and inspiration, painting the white lines of football pitches on Hackney Marshes or trawling for used books in Kingsland Waste Market.

Then, last Friday night, I had a call to say sorry, but the invitation was withdrawn. It seemed a diktat had come down from above that I was a non-person and should be barred from the library for the crime of writing an off-message piece on the Olympics. This essay, published in the London Review of Books, responded to aspects of the creation of the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley: the destruction of the Manor Garden allotments, the eviction of travellers, and the famous 'legacy' revealed as nothing more than a gigantic shopping mall in Stratford."

(Via Banned in Hackney - for going off-message about the Olympics |Books | The Guardian: .)

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| London Borough of Hackney | 22 October 2008; 10:23:00 AM |# | | Discuss |