October 16, 2026, (Inside AI) — Faber & Faber has stopped supplying Sally Rooney's novels in the UK after the author pledged her royalties to Palestine Action, a group the UK government proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025. The publisher told BBC News that UK law prevents it from passing on her earnings. Rooney, author of the bestselling Normal People, has sold 2.3 million books in the UK, according to NielsenIQ BookData. The group remains legal in the Republic of Ireland. The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the ban next month.
This is not an isolated incident. It signals a growing collision between author activism and publisher legal exposure. As AI tools make it easier for publishers to generate content without authors, and as political tensions rise, the line between creative freedom and corporate risk is thinning.
Meanwhile, another literary prize is embroiled in controversy after its winner was accused of generating their work using artificial intelligence. Simbarashe Kundizeza, the Zimbabwean writer who won this year's £10,000 (about ₹12.6 lakh) Caine Prize for African Writing, denies using AI to write his story "The Blue Fighter." The Atlantic reported that Pangram, an AI-detection tool, rated the story entirely machine-generated. Ellah Wakatama, who chairs the prize's trustees, told the BBC that such software should not be the final arbiter. The prize has begun an internal investigation.
Several African writers have argued that Black writers face disproportionate scrutiny. Similar allegations dogged this year's Commonwealth Short Story Prize and led to Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien's withdrawal from France's Goncourt Prize.
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The question of AI has also reached publishers' own offices. Publishers are challenging AI companies in court over copyrighted books, yet some are adopting the same technology in-house. A WIRED investigation drew on more than two dozen anonymous employees at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette. They said their employers use chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT to draft publicity copy and back-cover blurbs, and image generators to make cover art, often without telling authors. The report has prompted debate in many literary circles. Some staff are pushing back, and literary agents are considering adding contract clauses to protect authors' unpublished manuscripts.
This internal adoption reveals a stark double standard. Publishers are simultaneously suing AI firms for using copyrighted material while quietly using the same tools to cut costs. If this practice spreads, it could undermine the trust that authors place in their publishers. It also raises questions about transparency in an industry that prides itself on championing writers' rights.
Separately, Netflix's seven-part adaptation of East of Eden, released October 1, has revived a decades-old argument about John Steinbeck's most notorious character. The Nobel laureate, best known for The Grapes of Wrath, wove Biblical parallels into his 1952 family saga and presented its villain, Cathy Ames, as a monster born to human parents. Zoe Kazan's series gives Cathy a fuller inner life, splitting critics. Some argue it turns her into a misunderstood victim and disregards the themes of good and evil, others counter that Cathy remains a remorseless killer and that the series stays largely faithful to the novel. Kazan's grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film starring James Dean.
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In India, a dispute between two prize-winning Malayalam novelists has reached court. Author K R Meera has filed a criminal defamation complaint against Haritha Savithri, the Malayalam news site eVartha reported. In a Facebook post on May 5, Savithri alleged that Meera's novel Kalachi copies her novel Zin, which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2023. Meera, whose Aarachar reached English readers as Hangwoman, has denied the charge. She says Kalachi's plot and setting were public when it began appearing online as a serial in November 2020, nearly two years before Zin was published. Her complaint says the allegation harmed her reputation. The Chief Judicial Magistrate's court in Thrissur will take up the complaint on November 7.
