19-05-2025
Anthony Horowitz: Children can't read long books any more
Children may no longer have the attention span to read novels more than 300 pages long, according to Anthony Horowitz.
The 70-year-old author said he believed modern society was rewiring children's minds, and popular books were now 'very short' and had big type and lots of pictures.
He added that his bestselling Alex Rider series of children's books may not have been as successful if they were released now.
Speaking to the Headliners podcast, Mr Horowitz said: 'The world of children's books at the moment doesn't look to me to be in a very good state.
'I wonder if there is still a large audience for Alex Rider novels, which are long-ish, 300-plus pages and quite complicated. They are proper novels.
'I'm not saying they're great literature, but I am saying that they are, you know, proper novels. I worry that the audience is not there for them any more.
'Actually, if I was writing the Alex Rider books today, if I started with Stormbreaker this afternoon, I worry [if] it would find an audience because this is to do with attention spans, to do with social media, to do with smartphones, to do with the way that children's minds are being rewired almost by modern society.'
Mr Horowitz added that he was 'happy' his adult books now occupied most of his time, confirming that he currently had no plans 'to do any more Alex Riders'.
He continued: 'I have misgivings about the world of children's books. You know if you look in a bookshop, the books that seem to be popular – and I'm not decrying them for a minute because they are giving children pleasure – tend to have very bright colours on the cover and [a] sort of slightly cartoonish look.
'They're very short, they're big type, they're lots of pictures... that seems to be now what is more popular and it's not what I write.'
He added that the challenge may be to write books 'designed specifically for an audience that doesn't particularly want to read'.
'I have been thinking to myself for some time that everybody's saying that children don't want to read any more, that it's getting more and more difficult,' the author said. 'So why isn't a writer doing something about it to actually address the point, to produce a book that children will read?
'And does that mean that the book will have to be in some way really different to how books used to be and what they looked like? I'm beginning to think along those lines a little bit.'
'Pandering down to children'
Last year, Mr Horowitz claimed children's literature was ' going downhill ' because publishers were flooding the market with silly books rather than proper stories.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, he said: ' JK Rowling somehow managed to create a 600-page book with some quite demanding ideas in it and then the later Harry Potters, which are quite dark and certainly long, and they were this phenomenal international hit.
'Do you believe that any book published now, which had 150,000 words in it and aimed at a market of eight to 15-year-olds, would have any chance?'
He added: 'It worries me that the world of children's books has changed.
'It is beginning, I worry, to go downhill in the sense of lowering expectations – so many books, which are just funny, silly, bad jokes, and the actual idea of the literate children's book, the well-written, real story, is less popular now.
'It seems to me that if there's a trend in modern children's books, if you just walk into a bookshop and look at the covers around you, you now see the same imagery, the same gaudy colours, the same pandering down to children rather than raising their expectations.'
