The map is being redrawn: how a more divided world is reshaping international book rights

Stories have always travelled. Lately it is the borders that keep moving.

The last couple of years have made the politics of publishing a good deal less comfortable. In the United States, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of school book bans in the 2024-25 year alone, across 23 states, heavily concentrated in just a handful of them. Since 2021 the running total is close to 23,000. The American Library Association logged 4,235 title challenges in 2025. And it is not only an American habit: PEN International recorded 140 attacks on writers last year, while in Russia, publishers branded “foreign agents” have decamped abroad just to keep working. The Association of American Publishers gave its 2025 Freedom to Publish Award to one of them, Freedom Letters, now run from exile.

The people closest to it are not subtle about what is at stake. “By depriving a rising generation of the freedom to read, these bans are eating away at the foundations of our democracy,” says Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America. Her colleague Kasey Meehan, who runs the Freedom to Read programme, describes a “normalization of censorship” that has “worsened and spread over the last four years.” The academics see the same shape: the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute, whose data feeds the International Publishers Association’s “Trinity of Freedoms” reporting, has charted a long slide in free expression worldwide.

There is a “two countries” split inside America itself: PEN America found that 80% of last year’s school bans happened in just three states, led by Florida, with its Kasey Meehan calling it “increasingly a story of two countries.” Pull the lens back and the contrast only widens. The English-speaking world has always been the most closed to translated writing, with only around 3% of the books published in the US and UK originally written in another language, and nearer 0.7% for fiction and poetry. Across much of Europe that share runs anywhere from 30% to 60%, and in Italy it is roughly half. So at the very moment large parts of America are taking books off the shelf, the rest of the world is reading across borders more eagerly than ever.

For anyone who sells rights, this lands as more than a moral problem. It is a market one. When a book gets shut out of one country, its readers do not evaporate. They turn up somewhere else. Translation editions, diaspora audiences and exile publishers quietly absorb the titles that cannot get a hearing at home, so a book that is frozen in one market can be very much alive in three others. Pressure on free expression does not kill the appetite for a story. It just moves it across a border.

That movement is the rights business. It also makes the job harder. When the map keeps redrawing itself, you need to know, today, where every title’s rights are sold, open, newly possible or quietly off the table, and which editors can act while the window is still ajar. The agencies that do well in a jumpy world are the ones who can see the whole picture at a glance and move before it changes again. That is a tall order when the picture lives in fourteen spreadsheet tabs that were last accurate in April.

Getting good books across borders has rarely mattered more, or been more fiddly. The one thing that really should not be in doubt is whether your own records can keep up.