School cancels event with 'blasphemous' Meg Rosoff

The award-winning children's author Meg Rosoff's reimagining of God as a sex-mad teenage boy in her new novel There Is No Dog has proved unpalatable for a Christian independent school, which cancelled an event with the author because of the "blasphemous" nature of the book, her publisher said.

Rosoff had been booked to appear at the Bath boarding and day school Monkton Combe this week, as part of the Bath festival of children's literature. But her publisher Puffin said the school pulled out of the event after reading her novel, telling festival organisers that their objections centred on its "blasphemous" and "unsuitable nature". Puffin added that the Emirates Airline festival of literature in Dubai also withdrew an invitation to Rosoff to speak at its 2012 festival after reading the novel and feeling it was "unsuitable" for their audience, and publicity director Adele Minchin said that "a number" of other schools had also declined offers for Rosoff to speak to their pupils about There is No Dog "because they felt it was too controversial a subject matter to expose their pupils to".

Winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize for her debut How I Live Now and of the Carnegie medal for Just in Case, There Is No Dog sees Rosoff tell the story of a self-centred, 19-year-old version of God, Bob. Spending most of his time thinking about girls and sleeping, Bob creates the world in six days because he can't be bothered to take any longer and forgets to provide food so animals have to eat each other.

Monkton Combe principal Richard Backhouse said: "Parents in this part of south west England have a rich choice of schools. As a school, we take seriously our responsibility to honour the choice parents have made by providing an education which reflects our ethos. At the start of this term, we made the decision that hosting the author Meg Rosoff to talk about her latest book, There Is No Dog, and subtitled What If God Were A Teenage Boy?, was not an appropriate reflection of our ethos."

Rosoff said in a statement issued by her publisher that she had never written "out of a desire to be controversial", rather "simply to explore psychological and philosophical issues that interest and trouble me – gender, war, identity, religion, love". She said it was "disappointing that some schools feel that the subject of my book is unsuitable for their pupils as I consider it part of my job as a writer to explore sensitive issues, and to let my adolescent readers find hope, humour and redemption in a world full of danger and loss".

Minchin at Puffin added that it was "a great shame that a school would see fit not to give their pupils the opportunity to explore their beliefs and to engage with such universal issues as religion with a hugely popular author of Meg's calibre. She is one of the UK's most respected writers for teens and her books are always thought-provoking, funny, challenging and insightful which is exactly why we publish her."