The Royal Society of Literature campaigns on important matters such as the teaching of English in schools, the preservation of public libraries, and authors’ rights. It does this – often in conjunction with other organisations – by lobbying government bodies, organising debates, and drawing attention to these issues in the press.

The Council of the Royal Society of Literature strongly opposes cuts to, and the closure of, public libraries. Below, a number of them express their feelings on their subject.

To my mind free public access to books, learning, the literatures of the world isn't far from being a matter of human rights. The closure of so many of our libraries, the curtailing of these open resources by local authorities pushed by government policy, is telling and discomfiting when it comes to the nature and the responsibilities of current culture.  We should protest the closures with everything we've ever learned.
Ali Smith

Anyone who has loved and used libraries since early childhood knows
how essential they are for both learning and happiness. It is terrible
to think of closing a single one.
Caroline Moorehead

It’s simple. Not everybody who wants to read can afford books.  Which is not even to mention people who’ve yet to find out that books are for them; those for whom a local library serves as a cunningly-sociable community portal into worlds of enlargement and possibility. We have regressed to the nineteenth century, which did not “waste” education on those who knew their place.  For reading isn’t just about information. In closing the public libraries we’re privatizing thought itself.
Fiona Sampson

Free access to books in public libraries is the mark of a civilised and civilising society.  Books introduce us to other worlds and viewpoints, take us into different lives and expand our sense of what it is to be human.  If public libraries continue to close,  the horizons which might have opened up to present and  future generations will instead contract, and we will all end up impoverished.
Peter Parker

I feel that my local library saved my life. There weren't many places to go -- and not many places to work your head -- and the library became a refuge. As a young person, I loved it there and felt that the world opened up to me on those yellow evenings at the town library. Every generation, at whatever age, should have that chance. Even, or perhaps especially, in the darkest times, we must keep our libraries open.
Andrew O'Hagan

The wholesale closure of libraries amounts to a wilful act of Philistinism: in straitened times, literature is seen as dispensible. Our society is, already, culturally under-nourished. The savings made by this calculated vandalism are as nothing when set beside the loss to the community at large.
David Harsent

In today's commercial highstreet, the public library is an oasis of knowledge and understanding.  Every time a library closes down, a spark of civilisation disappears from our lives.
Colin Thubron

Thomas Carlyle wrote with persuasive passion on the value of libraries-- "A collection of good books is the best of all Universities; for the University only teaches us how to read the book: you must go to the book itself for what it is."  Free public libraries have been an essential part of the fabric of British life for well over a century; Carlyle, that great autodidact, must be turning in his grave at what is happening now.
Helen Simpson

Libraries liberate reading, and education, from the constraints of an individual’s income—that  is an incalculable good.
Romesh Gunesekera