Australian author Markus Zusak has marked the 20th anniversary of The Book Thief with a US tour and a wide-ranging interview in which he addressed the novel’s renewed political resonance, the global acceleration of book censorship, and what two decades of reader response has taught him about the work.
Speaking to bookriot.com‘s Kelly Jensen during a stop on his anniversary tour, Zusak described the novel’s changed atmosphere for contemporary readers. When the book was published in 2006, he said, it felt like “looking back” at Nazi Germany; now, he suggested, readers may feel they are simply looking around. “Humanity doesn’t stop,” he said. “We’re always walking this line.”
The Book Thief, set in wartime Germany and narrated by Death, follows Liesel Meminger, a girl sent to a foster home who finds solace in stealing and reading books amid the devastation of the Second World War. Zusak described its central premise as a story about a girl who “steals the words back” from a regime that destroyed people with language, and writes her own story with them.
On the question of whether the novel belongs to young adult or adult literature, Zusak was characteristically direct. “It was a book that said: this is for you, but you’ve got to come up here to read it.” He credited its cross-generational reach to authorial authenticity rather than calculated positioning, arguing that writers should produce work so singular that no one else could have written it.
The most substantial portion of the conversation addressed book censorship. Zusak noted that his original draft of The Book Thief did not include a book burning, which he initially dismissed as predictable, before recognising it as essential to the story. The image of Liesel stealing a book from the ashes, still warm against her body, became one of the novel’s defining scenes.
On the wider censorship crisis in the United States, Scotland, Ireland, Russia and Australia, Zusak was unambiguous. “Stories are what we’re made of,” he said. Attempts to control them, he argued, are ultimately attempts to erode empathy, the capacity to understand experiences foreign to one’s own. “You see what that leads to,” he added, drawing a direct line between censorship and the political conditions the novel itself depicts.
Asked about the most meaningful experiences of the past two decades, Zusak pointed not to prizes or sales figures but to readers at independent bookshops who told him The Book Thief was their favourite book. “I could never get tired of hearing that,” he said. “As a writer, there is nothing better.”
He closed by recommending The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank as his foremost choice of historical fiction, “a heartfelt rendering of everyday life” that only fully reveals its weight on the final page.
