Banned Books Around the World: Censorship on Every Continent

Book bans tend to make headlines as an American story (school boards, library committees, parents at the podium), but censorship has a much bigger and stranger history.

The following list is a world tour of banned books, featuring three of the most famous banned books per continent.

Together, they show just how differently, and how similarly, societies decide a book is too dangerous to leave on the shelf.

Six continents, 18 books, and one clear pattern: the books that governments try hardest to bury are usually the ones worth digging up.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links and as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This means I earn a small commission if you choose to make a purchase using a link, but at no cost to you. I’ve included Amazon links to each recommended book as well as Everand, Spotify, and Bookshop.org (US and UK) where available.

---

AFRICA

Burger’s Daughter – Nadine Gordimer (South Africa, 1979)

Rosa Burger, the white daughter of a famous anti-apartheid activist, tries to work out what she owes to her father’s legacy and to the struggle he gave his life to.

Why it Was Banned:

The apartheid government’s Publications Control Board prohibited the import and sale of the novel a month after its UK publication.

Three months later, the Publications Appeal Board reversed the decision, ruling the book “inflammatory” rather than genuinely harmful.

Gordimer, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, responded to the ban with a published collection of essays titled What Happened to Burger’s Daughter.

---

Petals of Blood – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya, 1977)

Four residents of the fictional village of Ilmorog become suspects in a murder investigation that gradually exposes the corruption and betrayal of post-independence Kenya.

Why it Was Banned:

Months after the novel’s publication, the Kenyan government detained Ngũgĩ without charge for a year in a maximum-security prison, holding him partly for possessing his own banned book alongside his play I Will Marry When I Want.

Ngũgĩ later said two senior government officials had personally flown to demand his arrest, each holding a copy of the novel in one hand.

---

Children of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt, 1959)

An allegorical retelling of the Abrahamic prophets (Adam, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad) refigured as ordinary residents of a single Cairo alley ruled over by a distant, godlike patriarch.

Why it Was Banned:

Egypt’s religious authority Al-Azhar blocked the novel’s publication as a standalone book over its allegorical treatment of God and the prophets, a ban that lasted until 2006.

In 1994, three years before the ban was even lifted, two extremists stabbed the 82-year-old Mahfouz (by then a Nobel laureate) in the neck outside his Cairo home, permanently damaging his writing hand.

---

ASIA

The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie (India, 1988)

A magic-realist novel following two Indian expatriates in London, one of whom dreams sequences involving a character loosely modelled on the Prophet Muhammad.

Why it Was Banned:

India became the first country in the world to ban the novel, just ten days after publication, followed within weeks by Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia and Saudi Arabia.

India’s import ban technically remained in place for 36 years, until a Delhi court lifted it in 2024 after officials were unable to locate the original banning order.

---

Barefoot Gen – Keiji Nakazawa (Japan)

This autobiographical manga follows a young boy’s survival of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and its brutal aftermath, drawn from the author’s own childhood experience.

Why it Was Banned:

The manga was removed from elementary and junior high schools in Matsue City over its graphic depictions of the bombing’s aftermath.

Some critics have also called for its removal over its unflinching portrayal of wartime Japan itself, arguing the book paints an unflattering picture of the era.

---

Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi (Iran, 2000)

This autobiographical graphic memoir follows Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War.

Why it Was Banned:

The book and its 2007 film adaptation are banned in Iran itself over their critical depiction of the regime.

Chicago Public Schools separately pulled the memoir from classrooms in 2013 over a single panel depicting torture, before reversing course days later amid a student-led protest and union backlash.

---

EUROPE

Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak (Soviet Union, 1957)

Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet, tries to hold onto his humanity and his love for Lara through the chaos of the Russian Revolution and civil war.

Why it Was Banned:

Soviet censors read the novel’s quiet individualism as an attack on Stalinism and collectivisation, and blocked its publication entirely.

Pasternak smuggled the manuscript to an Italian publisher, reportedly telling the courier, “you are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad,” according to the Washington Post’s account of the affair.

The CIA later secretly printed a Russian-language edition and distributed it to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, viewing the banned book as a propaganda weapon. It remained banned in the USSR until 1988.

---

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence (United Kingdom, 1928/1960)

Constance Chatterley, married to a wealthy but paralysed aristocrat, begins a passionate affair with her husband’s gamekeeper.

Why it Was Banned:

The unexpurgated novel couldn’t be openly published in Britain until 1960, when Penguin Books was prosecuted for obscenity in a trial that became a genuine cultural landmark.

The prosecutor famously asked jurors whether it was a book they’d want “your wife or your servants” to read; the jury took three hours to acquit Penguin, and the first print run of 200,000 copies sold out on day one.

The book was separately banned in Australia, Canada, India and Japan.

---

The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien (Ireland, 1960)

Two young women, Cait and Baba, leave their sheltered rural upbringing behind for convent school and then Dublin, discovering friendship, romance and disillusionment along the way.

Why it Was Banned:

Ireland’s Censorship of Publications Board banned the novel almost immediately on publication (one of 35 books banned on the same day in June 1960!) officially on grounds of “indecency,” objecting to its frank depiction of adolescent female sexuality and desire: an allusion to a lesbian awakening, a nun described as “getting friendly” with a gardener.

The reaction went well beyond the official ban: a local parish priest publicly burned a copy, the Archbishop branded it a “smear on Irish womanhood,” and O’Brien was denounced from pulpits.

Her next five novels were banned in Ireland too; the ban on The Country Girls itself wasn’t lifted until 1987.

---

NORTH AMERICA

Maus – Art Spiegelman (United States, 1986)

Spiegelman interviews his father about surviving the Holocaust, depicting Jewish characters as mice and Nazis as cats in a landmark graphic memoir.

Why it Was Banned:

In January 2022, Tennessee’s McMinn County School Board voted unanimously to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel from its eighth-grade curriculum, citing profanity and a single image of nudity.

Spiegelman called the decision “Orwellian,” and comic shop owners around the country responded by offering free copies to any student in the district who wanted one.

---

The Diviners – Margaret Laurence (Canada, 1974)

Morag Gunn, a middle-aged novelist and single mother living beside the Otonabee River in Ontario, looks back on her upbringing in the fictional prairie town of Manawaka while navigating her daughter’s own coming of age.

Why it Was Banned:

In 1976, a local minister and a school board trustee led complaints that got the novel challenged in two Peterborough, Ontario high schools over its language and depictions of sex.

Laurence, deeply private, was reportedly devastated by anonymous letters comparing her to well-known “pornographers”; further attempts to ban the novel, which won Canada’s Governor General’s Award, continued in Canadian school districts into the 1980s.

---

The Death of Artemio Cruz – Carlos Fuentes (Guatemala, 1962)

A wealthy, morally corrupt Mexican newspaper magnate reflects, in fragmented flashbacks from his deathbed, on the betrayals and compromises that took him from revolutionary idealism to ruthless self-interest.

Why it Was Banned:

The novel, by one of Mexico’s most celebrated writers, was banned in neighbouring Guatemala for its critical portrayal of the ruling government of the day.

Fuentes went on to become one of the most internationally acclaimed novelists of the Latin American literary “Boom” of the 1960s.

---

SOUTH AMERICA

Clandestine in Chile – Gabriel García Márquez (Chile, 1986)

This nonfiction account follows the real-life clandestine return of Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littín to Pinochet’s Chile, disguised and travelling under a false identity to document the country under dictatorship.

Why it Was Banned:

Chilean customs authorities seized almost 15,000 copies of the book in late 1986, which were then publicly burned by the military in the port city of Valparaíso.

The American Library Association condemned the burning as “a despicable form of suppression.”

---

The Knight of Hope – Jorge Amado (Brazil, 1942)

A biography of imprisoned revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes, written partly to campaign for his release, and addressed directly to an imagined Brazilian reader.

It’s never been published in English, so the link below is for the original Portguese:

Why it Was Banned:

The book circulated only on the black market in Brazil after its 1945 domestic edition, and vanished from shelves entirely following the 1964 military coup, not resurfacing in a new edition until 1979.

Amado, one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists, was imprisoned multiple times for his leftist politics and remains among the roughly 140 Brazilian authors whose books were formally banned under the country’s 1964–1985 military dictatorship.

---

Open Veins of Latin America – Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay, 1971)

A sweeping, polemical history tracing five centuries of European and American exploitation of Latin America’s people and resources, from colonial silver mines to twentieth-century multinational corporations.

Why it Was Banned:

The book was simultaneously banned by the military dictatorships of Galeano’s native Uruguay, along with neighbouring Chile and Argentina, and the author himself was briefly imprisoned before fleeing into eleven years of exile.

Despite (or because of) the bans, the book went on to sell over a million copies and was famously handed to President Obama by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in 2009.

---

OCEANIA

Into the River – Ted Dawe (New Zealand, 2012)

Te Arepa Santos, a bright Māori teenager, is sent to a prestigious boarding school where he must navigate bullying, racism and a world entirely unlike the one he grew up in.

Why it Was Banned:

In 2015, New Zealand’s Film and Literature Board of Review placed an interim restriction order on the novel, making it illegal to sell, lend or even display; the first book banned in the country in 22 years.

The ban followed lobbying from a conservative Christian group (which objected to the novel’s depiction of underage sex, drug use, and coarse language involving its teenage characters) and came after the book had briefly become the country’s most-borrowed YA title.

---

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis (Australia, 1991)

Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Manhattan investment banker, narrates his own escalating violence in a satire of 1980s consumerism and status obsession.

Why it Was Banned:

Australia classified the novel as a restricted “Category One” publication on release, meaning it can still only be sold shrink-wrapped to adults, and it remains completely unavailable for sale in Queensland to this day.

Ellis has said he found the restriction “adorable,” though he was less amused when the novel resurfaced during a Canadian murder trial after the killer described it as his “bible.”

---

Love Me Sailor – Robert Close (Australia, 1945)

Aboard a windjammer trading guano between Chile and the United States, the sole woman passenger becomes the object of obsession for an all-male crew, in a novel that pushed hard against Australia’s mid-century standards of decency.

Why it Was Banned:

Close and his publisher were prosecuted for the rare criminal offence of “obscene libel” across three sensational trials between 1946 and 1948, and Close became the only Australian author ever jailed over a work of fiction, serving ten days of a reduced sentence.

The English edition was separately banned as a prohibited import in 1951, after the Customs Minister personally overruled the censorship board’s recommendation to allow it; the novel wasn’t legally available in Australia again until 1960.

---

More Banned Books Around the World

What I find interesting is how often a ban becomes part of the book’s story and can even contribute to it’s success, becoming more famous for being banned!

If you’re building a global banned books list of your own, these are a genuinely solid place to start; a reminder that the impulse to control what people read is, unfortunately, a universal one.

Pin this post for later:

---

Fantastic Books & Where to Find Them

For more of what to read where, check out my full Travel Books Guide, filled with book recommendations for different destinations, the most beautiful bookstores around the world, tips on how to get the best deals on audiobooks and e-books, as well as more literary travel.