Local Author Blacklisted By Hackney Council?

This is the extraordinary claim made by Iain Sinclair. According to a piece in the Guardian, the author had an invitation to an event scheduled for next February in Stoke Newington library to promote his new book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, revoked. The reason? Sinclair believes he has become persona non grata, the victim of a McCarthyist witchhunt, as a result of an article he wrote for London Review of Books in June. In the piece he criticised the development of the 2012 Games site and bemoaned the loss of a historic "liminal zone" in Stratford, and the site's ultimate fate as a "termite shopping centre".