Isabel Allende has revealed her editor is updating her YA trilogy to avoid “offensive” outdated references.
The bestselling Chilean-American writer discussed it in an interview with the Times on Saturday (19th April). “Things that you could say before, today can be very offensive,” she said. “I wrote a trilogy for young adults years ago. There’s going to be a new edition. My editor has gone through them and there are things you can’t say any more. So she’s correcting them, changing them.”
The books, which started with City of the Beasts in 2006, were published by HarperCollins in the UK and Penguin Random House’s Flamingo imprint in the US.
Allende signed a new deal with Bloomsbury in the UK in 2019 and Random House Group’s Ballantine in America, following major auctions.
Allende has spoken out about similar editorial processes previously, when a publisher reportedly warned her against writing about the 1791 Haitian slave massacre in her 2009 novel Island Beneath the Sea (HarperCollins), though she ignored them. “And only one reader complained,” she told the Telegraph last November. “I told them I had the right to put myself in the skin of anybody – Black, white, tall, short, whatever. You don’t need to be limited to your tribe to write.”
The Bookseller has contacted Ballantine, Bloomsbury and HarperCollins for comment.
