Introduction: art and action: authorship, politics and celebrity

In 2015, the Irish Marriage Equality Referendum campaign found a fiercely outspoken advocate in the internationally award-winning Irish novelist and essayist Colm Tóibín. Throwing his full weight behind the campaign, he gave a talk at Trinity College Dublin on what it meant to be a gay man and writer in Ireland, which was subsequently reprinted as abridged versions in a wide range of news media, such as the Irish Times and The Independent (Doyle 2015, Tóibín 2015). Emphasising how the referendum campaign had ‘allowed us to speak openly about the terms of our love’, Tóibín (2015) made a powerful case for the constitutional protection of gay rights. More recently, acclaimed British novelist, broadcaster and journalist Jeanette Winterson joined the debate on authorship, anonymity and the problematic entanglement of the author’s life and work surrounding the revelation of best-selling Italian author Elena Ferrante’s identity (see Braun 2016a). In a piece for The Guardian she took a staunchly feminist stance, arguing that Ferrante’s exposure was driven by ‘pompous unthinking sexism’ and the ‘obsessional outrage at the success of a writer – female – who decided to publish and promote her books on her own terms’ (Winterson 2016). These are just two recent examples of eminent authors of fiction taking advantage of their high public profiles and cultural capital in order to draw attention to specific sociopolitical concerns. Their powerful public interventions neatly tie in with a note of warning sounded by two-times Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel in an essay for the autumn 2016 issue of Index on Censorship. Speaking out on the ‘old struggles’ of censorship and self-censorship in different cultural and historical contexts, she was quick to remind authors of the potential political impact of their work: ‘If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all; the only tip you can give to a prospective writer is “Try to mean what you say”’ (Mantel 2016, pp. 66 and 68). As demonstrated in Celebrity Studies 6 (4), a 2015 special issue, the present age of the ‘celebvocate’ (Tsaliki 2015, p. 235) has seen celebrities in all fields eagerly making forays into political activism, converting their ‘attention capital’ (Van Krieken 2012, p. 10) into discursive power and actual political influence (see also Brockington 2009, Tsaliki et al. 2011, Kapoor 2013). This Forum issue specifically focuses on the multi-layered intersections of literary celebrity and politics, exploring writerly field migrations between literature and the sphere of political engagement in the Anglophone world across historical periods and media. The Forum brings together four short essays that cast a spotlight on