Despite Roald Dahl having enjoined his publishers not to "so much as change a single comma in one of my books", in February 2023 Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books, announced it would be re-writing portions of many of Dahl's children's novels, changing the language to, in the publisher's words, "ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today".[3] The decision was met with sharp criticism from groups and public figures including authors Salman Rushdie[4][5] and Christopher Paolini,[5] British prime minister Rishi Sunak,[4][6] Queen Camilla,[4][7] Kemi Badenoch,[8] PEN America,[4] and Brian Cox.[8] Dahl's publishers in the United States, France, and the Netherlands declined to incorporate the changes.[4]
In Fantastic Mr. Fox, more than fifty changes were made, including removing the word black from the description of tractors ("The machines were both black"), removing references to characters' height and weight and changing Mr. Fox’s son to a daughter.[9][10] A line saying that "fat Boggis was hopping about like a dervish" was also altered to just "Boggis was hopping about like a frog".[10]
