Lionel Shriver’s remarks during her keynote—which centered on “political correctness efforts” to stop writers from cultural appropriation—at the Brisbane (Australia) Writers Festival earlier this month prompted Sudanese-born Australian memoirist Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s exit and the festival director’s decision to offer last-minute counterprogramming.

“Lionel Shriver, by her own admission, did not speak to her brief,” said the festival director and poet Julie Beveridge two weeks ago to the New York Times. (Shriver was billed to discuss “community and belonging.”) “The views she expressed during her address were hers alone.”

In a New York Times op-ed over the weekend titled “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?,” Shriver, author of thirteen novels, responded to the upset at length, maintaining her view that “fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction—thus should not let concerns about ‘cultural appropriation’ constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds than our own.”

The identity-politics movement is at the root of the issue, Shriver goes on to add, and has contributed to the Left becoming “the oppressor,” over conservatives “sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.”

“Among millennials and those coming of age behind them,” Shriver writes, “the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved—who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.”

Ryan Harrington of Melville House wrote in a blog post that he agrees with the necessity of intellectual discussion without controversy, but noted that Shriver never answered the “implicit question that started this mess: Should we take cultural appropriation seriously?”

In the meantime, other writers have explored the question of how cultural appropriation affects writers and readers alike, including Kaitlyn Greenidge in the New York Times, Nisha Susan in The Hindu, Ken Kalfus in The Washington Post, Alexander Nazaryan in Newsweek, and Svetlana Mintcheva in Salon. Kalfus argues that Shriver’s depiction of minority characters, particularly in The Mandibles, is not cultural appropriation, but characterizations of a racially charged nature, while Nazarayan writes that success at portraying a character “that is complex and true, depends on the capacity of the writer as a writer and on their creative integrity, not on their skin color, sexuality, or cultural background.”

Photo Credit: Wikipedia.