Keep Notes and Carry On

On incendiary comments made by a Melbourne bookstore owner

The Australian book scene was deemed newsworthy in late January 2024 when the CEO of a bookshop chain called Robinson’s, Susanne Horman, was discovered to have made incendiary comments on X under the hashtag #WeNeedBetterStories. Horman called for an end to books that promote “the woke agenda”. This would have elicited a mere collective eyeroll from the industry given Suzanne Horman’s past form, but she elaborated on that by lamenting the lack of children’s picture books with “just white kids on the cover”, and said that she was fed up with “wheelchair, rainbow, or indigenous art”.

I use the term discovered to have made incendiary comments because Horman had originally posted her comments in December to her small following and received zero likes, retweets or replies. There are several reasons that this bookshop CEO wasn’t popular on social media before this incident — which I won’t elaborate on in this piece — but her comments have now attracted a particular “anti-woke” crowd.

I was ma…