Author Marcus Amis threw an insult at children's book authors on the BBC book program "Faulks on Fiction," The Guardian reported.
While on the show, Amis said:
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
He went on to add, "I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write."
These comments have rendered many children's book authors very offended. Lucy Coats responded to his statements on her blog, calling them "arrogant twaddle," and remarking that they were an "implicit insult to those of us who do write children's books."
Coats went on the note that children are much more intelligent that Amis gives them credit for, and that she does not "write down" to them. She states that the process of writing a children's book is much the same as that of writing a novel. She noted, "When I write, I think about language, the richness and complexity and wonder of it, and I use it to hook the reader into my story, to ensnare them in my net of words, to take them so far that they forget that what they are seeing is only print on a page of a dead tree."
For writer Jane Stemp, the comment was particularly insulting: "I have brain damage ... So Amis couldn't have insulted me harder if he'd sat down and thought about it for a year. Superglueing him to a wheelchair and piping children's fiction into his auditory canal suddenly seems like a good idea."
Writer John Dougherty simply dismissed the statements made with, "Don't worry Martin. We can't all be imaginative and versatile."
This is neither the first (nor likely the last) time that Amis has made offensive comments. In 2009, he dismissed model/author Katie Price as "two bags of silicone" and in a 2006 interview with The Times, he stated that Muslims should "suffer until they get their house in order."