Five authors who criticised the ‘Harry Potter’ books
In 1997 a book was released that would change the face of popular culture forever: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A magical adventure that followed the titular orphan’s first steps into the wizarding world, the book captured the imaginations of both children and adults. Author J.K. Rowling was even hailed as the contemporary successor to the likes of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl as excitement was whipped up into a frenzy.
The release kickstarted a best-selling series of seven books that concluded with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007. By the time Rowling had finished the story – ten years after the release of the first entry – the characters of Harry, Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, et al. were cultural institutions, thanks in part to a film series of the same name that kicked off the careers of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson.
Reflecting just how successful the books were, as of 2018, the Harry Potter efforts had shipped more than 500 million copies worldwide. The numbers confirmed it as the best-selling book series in history, with translations into over 80 languages. With the story amping up and Rowling starting to tie the threads together, the final four books consecutively set the record as the fastest-selling novels in history. The Deathly Hallows sold around 2.7 million units in the United Kingdom and 8.3 million in the United States within its first 24 hours of release.
Despite the historic success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it hasn’t been saved from criticisms, with some of the most significant and damning coming from other members of the literary world. From it being described as a hollow rip-off of the works of others to more cutting takes that posit it is an embodiment of the vacuous modern age, a variety of revered authors have delivered negative analyses of Rowling’s work. Their accounts are tinged with the realism that seems anathema to some Potter fans.
Join us, then, as we list five authors who hate Harry Potter.
Authors who criticise Harry Potter:
Will Self
Who better to start with than Will Self? When he’s not writing books, broadcasting or making Conservative politicians quake, he has been known to comment on the works of other authors. When speaking to The Guardian in 2018, Self was asked which book he thinks is the most overrated, to which he gave a succinct dressing down of Harry Potter.
He said: “All that bullshit about how the Harry Potter books were going to turn a generation of otherwise uninterested boys into literary mavens – we could’ve done without that. The truth is that the books ushered in the dumb kidult era we’re currently having to endure, with illiteracy rates significantly on the rise for the first time in a century!”
Ursula K. Le Guin
The late Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the modern masters of science fiction and fantasy, with her Hainish Cycle and Earthsea series as coveted as they come. Enjoying a career that started in 1959 and ended with her death in 2018, her works established various well-known tropes and inspired many, including Michael Chabon and China Miéville.
In fact, parallels were drawn between some of her works and Harry Potter, ultimately leading to K. Le Guin becoming one of the most famous critics of the series. When speaking to The Guardian in 2005, she made her thoughts clear after it was noted that she credited Rowling with giving the “whole fantasy field a boost”.
“I didn’t feel she ripped me off, as some people did,” she replied, “Though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. That hurt.”
A year before this, in a Q&A with the same publication, K. Le Guin was more damning of Rowling and the boy who lived. She said: “I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the ‘incredible originality’ of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel’, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.”
A.S. Byatt
One of the most prominent critiques of Harry Potter came courtesy of A.S. Byatt. An eminent author, she has released many celebrated works across her career. Her 1994 collection, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, was recently adapted into the feature-length film Three Thousand Years of Longing by George Miller.
Writing for the New York Times in 2003, she delivered one of the most unrelenting criticisms of the Harry Potter series to date, claiming that it is a manifestation of modern malaise. “Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing ‘secondary worlds.’ Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from ‘Star Wars’ to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing,” she wrote.
Elsewhere, Byatt opined: “Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ‘only personal.’ Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.”
Concluding her extensive piece, she expressed: “It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the levelling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists. It’s fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It’s become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called ‘consumable’ books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats’s magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'”
Diane Duane
Diane Duane is another respected author of fantasy, with her oeuvre including the Young Wizards young adult fantasy series and the Rihannsu Star Trek novels. Unsurprisingly, she’s one of the authors inspired to take up the craft by K. Le Guin.
She took to Twitter in 2021 to discuss her frustration that someone had called one of her books a “ripoff” of Harry Potter, although it came out in 1983. Duane wrote: “(re SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD, at a signing:) “This book’s a ripoff of Harry Potter, isn’t it?” “Um, no, since it came out in 1983.” (After a surprised pause, actually *cheerfully:*) “…Oh, that’s okay then, it’s probably no good anyway!”
Then, someone who claimed to be a reformed Harry Potter fan replied: “I am not going to deny that I was a HP stan at one point in my life, but I stg that series and its success has given people some weird variant of brain worms. There are lots of wizard books in the world! And a lot of them are BETTER! People are the worst.”
In response, Duane said: “Re other wizard books: speaking as someone who was radicalized by Le Guin, I have to agree.”
Anthony Holden
The final critique of Harry Potter came from Anthony Holden, the famed biographer-cum-poker player, who has penned biographies of everyone from Shakespeare to Laurence Olivier.
Discussing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2000, when he was one of the Whitbread Prize judges, Holden wrote: “What I do object to is a pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style which has left me with a headache and a sense of a wasted opportunity. If Rowling is blessed with this magic gift of tapping into young minds, I can only wish she had made better use of it. Her characters, unlike life’s, are all black-and-white . Her story-lines are predictable, the suspense minimal, the sentimentality cloying every page. (Did Harry, like so many child-heroes before him, HAVE to be yet another poignant orphan?)'”
Elsewhere, Holden claimed it would have been a “national humiliation” if Rowling’s book had won ahead of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
