5 Global Stories of Censorship
Posted on October 07, 2025
"Who told you to read such a book?" a disgruntled teacher asks the young Habibe Jafarian in her personal essay "For the Love of the Books," which documents her experience growing up as a bookworm in Iran's religious city of Mashhad. Jafarian's essay feels especially relevant as we see book bans proliferate in nearly every US state.
Over the past several months, students and teachers in the United States have witnessed a rise in threats to free speech, occurring everywhere from school libraries to social media platforms to late-night television shows. While students wrap their heads around the effects of these attacks on expression in their own lives, they may find it helpful to read literature that contextualizes free speech as a global issue with a long history. Below, we suggest five readings from advocates around the world who have stood up for their rights to read, speak, protest, and publish.
- In "An Iranian Metamorphosis," illustrator Mana Neyestani describes his own Kafkaesque experience of being thrown in prison over 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. Huang's translations on WWB Campus include Wang Dan's "Prison Memoirs" and Liao Yiwu's "An Interview with Wu Wenjian," two firsthand accounts from participants in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
- In the literacy narrative "For the Love of the Books," Habibe Jafarian describes reading censored books as an Iranian teen despite discouragement from family members and teachers.
- Bonus: Read fiction by authors whose works are banned in their home countries, including Hamid Ismailov's "The Stone Guest," a story about an Uzbek émigré whose life in Moscow is upended by an unexpected visit; and Xie Peng and Duncan Jepson's "Sharing," an illustrated story from China of fitting in and making friends in a big city.
