To tell you all that David Walliams has been dropped by his publisher Harper Collins?

Why is everyone talking about these like they have anything in common??
The Boy in the Dress is about a boy who chooses to wear a dress. Bill's New Frock is about a boy who is wearing a dress/has turned into a girl against his will. They have absolutely no similarities in their plots.

exactly - I'd see him and wonder how anyone watched him. So strange to put him on mainstream tv, bad decisions all around

But everytime you download music or buy a book the artist gets a royalty payment. Yes, a small amount but these small amounts add up.

There have been allegations about that creep for years, particularly surrounding him inviting teenage girls back to his hotel room so I wasn't surprised at all that female staff at Harper Collins had to be told to visit him in pairs.

He also pulled that poor teenage boy's trousers down on stage which is on camera, and his comments on BGT were proven so we know what he is.

I agree with OP that there's more that will hopefully come out. I don't know who is still hiring him in this day and age!

And yet Penguin is still trailing Sal Walker's 'On Winter Hill', supposedly to be released in 2028, and still have 'an unflinching true story' on the cover of The Salt Path.

Some people seem to be more in the firing line than others.

I know it's not the point but have you seen his paintings? Crap!

Currently in print. Harper Collins would have looked at the sales figures and crunched the data before making this decision. He fell out of favour a long time ago.

Yeah, and Adolf Hitler did some lovely watercolours, eh?

The worst one for me was the woman who was incontinent of urine - that was the whole joke, her being incontinent everywhere.

Horrible.

Agree with this. In my opinion Walliams' and Lucas's distaste for women, people with disabilities and others shone through right from the start. I just couldn't understand why it was ever popular.

As are a lot of his fellow children's authors. There is a good bit of rejoicing going on.

I’m usually all for separating the art from the artist, but think that his books are lazy, stereotype-riven, badly-written, derivative tripe. So yes, happy to see him over.

He has a huge blacklist, all still in print. That will be making HC a lot of money. HC wouldn't walk away from that for no good reason.

His books?! I don’t think he actually wrote them. I suspect he had an initial idea and a ghost writer was then brought it.

His books are dreadful. I have never had one in my class library.

@EmmaOfNormandy it is believed that Roald Dahl had such severe brain injury when he crashed his plane in WW2 that his whole personality changed and basically made him into a horrible arse.
I don't know if that's true though.

I fucking hated little Britain. My friends big brother is a wheelchair user and we’d take him the shops and the amount of utter dickheads who’d say “I want that one” at us when we’d wheel him past them was unreal.
It was racist, ableist and sexist shite. And deeply unfunny. It felt dated at the time. Aged like milk.

Especially when you had the cheek to tell others not to post gifs, which quite honestly has been a high point of this otherwise rather characterless thread.

I guess you want all the space for your own posts?

If DW is problematic, then what about Roald Dahl

https://time.com/5937507/roald-dahl-anti-semitism/

Separate the art from the artist. I love Roald Dahl's books and hate antisemitism. It's fine, I don't need to be friends with the guy to think Matilda is one of the best kids' books ever written.

However.

No one's talking about banning or burning his books so it's not performative activism. And he can find another publisher so he's not being silenced.

But the publisher may have all sorts of reasons which are not woke cancellation related. Bad press around a person means people are less likely to buy their books. So if the publisher are paying him masses and he's not making it back that could be a reason.

Another is if he's been getting gropey with any of the publishers' own staff they could be facing lawsuits and have no choice but to drop him.

Either way his books are horrible.

Not surprised. His books haven’t sold well for years, the last one was shocking. I’ve noticed more and more of them cropping up on Vinted and in charity shops with zero interest.

I think the Roald Dahl comparisons are mainly because they were marketed to look so much like them, with the Quentin Blake (originally) illustrations.

Dahl was far from perfect but he was a much better writer than Walliams.

Ronald Dahl 😂

How do you know his books are still selling well?

Your commitment to clogging the thread with pointless posts is quite something

Not fuck all at all. HC almost never drop back catalogues, especially such lucrative ones, or return rights to authors even ones that sell poorly. Something big is up.