Challenged Works
About the Challenged Works List
This selective list provides information numerous books and some magazines and newspapers that have been challenged in Canada in past decades. Each challenge sought to limit public access to these publications in schools, libraries, and elsewhere. Some challenges were upheld; others were rejected. We have tried to update our research on unresolved challenges.
Because some challenges are dismissed, the publications remain on library shelves or curriculum lists. We think it worthwhile to include such instances because the effect of a controversy over publications can spread, even though the would-be banners lose. A book or magazine with a controversial reputation can be quietly dropped from reading lists and curricula. This interference can be most insidious — quiet acquiescence to the scare tactics that would-be censors know how to employ.
Report a Challenge
Because organizations and community groups that ask for book and magazine bans usually want to avoid public controversies, we often find it difficult to discover why challenges are launched or what becomes of them. If you know of book or magazine or newspaper challenges or, better still, satisfactory resolutions anywhere in Canada, please use our online case study form to report a challenge to the Freedom of Expression Committee.
Report a ChallengeSearch the Challenged Works List
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess (1962)
A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange by English writer Anthony Burgess, is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters.
A Jest of God
Margaret Laurence (1966)
A Jest of God — which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 1966 — depicts the unhappy life of an elementary schoolteacher in small-town Manitoba.
