On this day...

American author, Alice Walker, was born in 1944. The youngest of eight, and the child of a farmer earning only $300 a year, Walker found herself in poor circumstances. As an African American, such circumstances were exaggerated further under the Jim Crow Laws; one white plantation even suggested to Walker's mother that blacks had 'no need for education'. Yet fortunately, Walker's mother refused to abide by such social rules, and indeed sent her to school a year early.

However, at the age of eight, a shooting incident marred Walker's childhood, leaving her permanently blind in one eye and with disfiguring scar tissue. It was then that Walker turned to writing, using it as a solace to which she could escape; an experience which allowed her to 'really notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out'. One of the most profound effects on her work, was that of meeting Martin Luther King while a student, and political activism is at the forefromt of many of her novels. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Walker's most notable work is 'The Color Purple'.

Brokeback Mountain inciting crime...

The Texan authorities have banned a wealth of famous and influential literature from their prisions. Inmates will now not be able to read works by Pulitzer Prize winners John Updike and Alice Walker, as well of novels by John Grisham, and Annie Proulx's 'Brokeback Mountain'. Even Nobel Laureates have been blacklisted, and a prisoners appeal has done little to abate the action. Any novel detailing drugs or weapons manufacturing, criminal schemes, racial insensitivity or escape aids has been cut, as, according to officers, 'what may not be judged inflammatory in the public at large can be inflammatory in prison'. The Conservative party has suggested a similar censorship for British prisons, however, it is likely to received in a similar manner to this; one of bemusement.