London | A furore over a children’s book by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver – which was pulled from bookshops in Australia and the UK after complaints over its handling of Indigenous issues – has cast fresh light on the publishing industry’s growing reliance on “sensitivity readers”.

In Britain, publishers were scratching their heads at how Penguin Random House UK had seemingly failed to put the manuscript of Oliver’s ghost-written fantasy, Billy and the Epic Escape, through the sensitivity-reader process – which aims to avoid exactly this kind of fracas.