The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas author John Boyne has swiped away criticism of his book, saying that learning the facts of the Holocaust should not be done through reading a novel. The Dublin-born writer (53) responded to criticism from Jewish groups and historians about his 2006 children’s fiction book, which explores the tragic friendship between the son of an SS officer and a prisoner boy at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. It was turned into a 2008 film starring Sex Education star Asa Butterfield as eight-year-old Bruno, who does not understand what is happening in the camps and thinks the prisoners are wearing pyjamas.
Boyne told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: “I think that the current climate that we’re living in, in publishing, is very nervous of anything that could potentially be controversial. READ MORE First Doireann Garrihy, now the 2 Johnnies and Jennifer Zamparelli: why are so many stars leaving 2FM? ‘My main takeaways a year after swapping Ireland for Portugal’ ‘My partner will not give up meeting people for sex. I feel enormous rejection’ Ireland’s best restaurants revealed at annual awards “My view on that book, and I have listened to a lot of the criticism, I’ve taken it in, some of it I understand, some of it I don’t understand it, but what I feel about it is that it is a novel, it’s subtitled a fable, a work of fiction with a moral at the centre.
“It was never pretending to be anything more than that. If you want the facts of t.
