Voidly · Verboten · Banned-books index · CC BY 4.0

Which books are banned, where, when, and on whose authority.

Verboten is a structured, source-cited index of book censorship worldwide — 19,283 titles that have been banned or restricted across 119 countries, every ban tied to a date, a stated reason, and a citation you can check. The same facts exist scattered across advocacy indexes, government gazettes, and news reports; Verboten is where they become one queryable answer.

The question only this answers

“Is this book banned in that country — and when did it start, under what reason?”

Look up any of 19,403 titles and see every country that has banned or restricted it, with dates and sources. Built for AI agents and journalists that need a verifiable answer, not a guess.

Search the index →

Banned/restricted titles

19,283

Countries

119

Dated ban events

34,987

Source citations

35,230

Banned (outright)

23,924

Restricted

10,854

Authors

12,210

Earliest record

1510s

Counts rank on distinct titles and distinct countries, never raw event rows (one US title banned across many school districts would otherwise inflate totals 2–3×).

The most-banned books in the world

Ranked by the number of distinct countries that have banned or restricted the title.

#	Title	Author	Year	Countries
1	The Satanic Verses	Salman Rushdie	1988	22
2	Lady Chatterley's Lover	D.H. Lawrence	1928	13
3	1984	George Orwell	1949	12
4	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	11
5	Animal Farm	George Orwell	1945	11
6	Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller	1934	9
7	The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown	2003	9
8	Mein Kampf	Adolf Hitler	1925	7
9	The Story of O	Pauline Réage	1954	6
10	Heartstopper	Alice Oseman	2018	6
11	All Quiet on the Western Front	Erich Maria Remarque	1929	6
12	On the Origin of Species	Charles Darwin	1859	5
13	The Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio	1353	5
14	Fanny Hill	John Cleland	1748	5
15	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932	5
16	Tropic of Capricorn	Henry Miller	1939	4
17	Tokyo Ghoul	Sui Ishida	2011	4
18	The Social Contract	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	1762	4
19	The Painted Bird	Jerzy Kosiński	1965	4
20	The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka	1915	4
21	The Jewel of Medina	Sherry Jones	2008	4
22	The Communist Manifesto	Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx	1848	4
23	The Anarchist Cookbook	William Powell	1971	4
24	Sophie's Choice	William Styron	1979	4
25	Portnoy's Complaint	Philip Roth	1969	4

Browse more books

The 25 most-banned titles above are already linked. Browse the other 175published book pages here, or search every titlein the full dataset.

Browse by country

Every country with a documented book ban, ranked by number of distinct titles. Each opens a page with the titles, reasons, timeline, and sources for that country.

Country	Titles	Ban events
United States	8,009	22,941
Germany	3,644	3,645
Malaysia	3,090	3,131
France	1,108	1,111
Argentina	642	642
Hong Kong	626	627
Russia	503	510
Belarus	344	347
New Zealand	206	206
India	120	120
Vatican City (Holy See)	119	120
South Africa	86	86
United Kingdom	69	73
China	57	59
Iran	52	56
Singapore	48	48
Spain	42	42
Australia	40	42
Ireland	39	39
Vietnam	31	33
Indonesia	28	29
Saudi Arabia	27	27
Brazil	26	26
Israel	26	26
Soviet Union	26	26

All 119 countries

Afghanistan (12)Albania (6)Algeria (9)Angola (2)Argentina (642)Australia (40)Austria (6)Azerbaijan (4)Bahrain (1)Bangladesh (8)Belarus (344)Belgium (2)Bosnia and Herzegovina (1)Brazil (26)Brunei (1)Bulgaria (11)Cameroon (2)Canada (23)Chile (17)China (57)Colombia (4)Cuba (21)Cyprus (1)Czech Republic (7)Czechoslovakia (23)Denmark (3)Dominican Republic (3)East Germany (DDR) (8)Ecuador (1)Egypt (23)El Salvador (2)Eritrea (2)Estonia (0)Ethiopia (5)Finland (2)France (1,108)Germany (3,644)Greece (13)Guatemala (6)Haiti (1)Honduras (1)Hong Kong (626)Hungary (19)India (120)Indonesia (28)Iran (52)Iraq (3)Ireland (39)Israel (26)Italy (24)Japan (8)Jordan (7)Kazakhstan (10)Kenya (10)Kuwait (15)Kyrgyzstan (2)Latvia (2)Lebanon (8)Libya (6)Lithuania (2)Malawi (3)Malaysia (3,090)Maldives (1)Malta (4)Mauritius (1)Mexico (6)Morocco (12)Mozambique (2)Myanmar (15)Netherlands (7)New Zealand (206)Nicaragua (5)Nigeria (15)North Korea (6)Norway (9)Oman (5)Pakistan (21)Palestine (5)Paraguay (5)Peru (4)Philippines (12)Poland (25)Portugal (23)Qatar (6)Romania (14)Russia (503)Saudi Arabia (27)Serbia (1)Singapore (48)Somalia (3)South Africa (86)South Korea (24)Soviet Union (26)Spain (42)Sri Lanka (4)Sudan (10)Sweden (4)Switzerland (5)Syria (6)Taiwan (15)Tajikistan (14)Tanzania (16)Thailand (8)Tunisia (6)Turkey (24)Turkmenistan (1)Uganda (9)Ukraine (5)United Arab Emirates (8)United Kingdom (69)United States (8,009)Uruguay (3)Uzbekistan (3)Vatican City (Holy See) (119)Venezuela (3)Vietnam (31)Yemen (1)Yugoslavia (21)Zimbabwe (14)

Why books get banned

Stated reasons drawn from the source taxonomy, by number of distinct titles. A single ban can cite more than one reason.

Political content: 9,813
Immorality: 4,797
Sexual content: 3,119
LGBTQ+ content: 2,573
Violence: 2,089
Other: 1,679
Race / colonialism: 1,579
Religious / blasphemy: 1,496
Obscenity: 590
Offensive language: 512
Drugs / substance use: 232

Book bans by decade

Distinct titles first banned or restricted in each decade (1510s–2020s). The recent surge is dominated by US school-district challenges.

1900s16

1910s26

1920s44

1930s3,712

1940s998

1950s914

1960s481

1970s1,364

1980s464

1990s841

2000s690

2010s685

2020s9,411

Method & caveats

Banned vs. restricted: A banned title is outright prohibited; a restricted one is lawful but constrained (no sale to minors, removed from a school library). They are never merged into one total.
Challenged is not banned: A challenge is a request to ban that did not succeed. It is recorded but never counted as a ban.
Every event is dated: Each ban carries the year it took effect and, where lifted, the year it ended — so the record is a timeline, not a snapshot.
Every event is cited: Each ban links to its source: a government record, classification decision, advocacy index, or news report, with a verification status.

Access & attribution

Search every titlesearch →
Look up any of 19,403 titles and see where it is banned. Client-side, instant.
Source datasetZenodo DOI →
Built on the Banned Books Open Censorship Core by banned-books.org, CC BY 4.0. Verboten adds normalization, per-country pages, and the lookup index; our compilation is CC BY 4.0.

Machine access

Verboten is built for AI agents and bots first. Every answer is a plain, cacheable JSON file — no server, no key, no rate limit. Point an agent at the manifest and it can resolve any country or title.

/verboten/api/index.json
Manifest: dataset stats, country index, endpoint map.
/verboten/api/country/{ISO}.json
Per-country summary — counts, top reasons, decade timeline, most-restricted titles. Keyed by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (e.g. IR, US).
/verboten/search-index.json
Every title with the countries that ban or restrict it — the lookup index.

Cite this

Attribute both Verboten and the underlying banned-books.org open core. Replace the access date.

APA

MORVS. (2026). Verboten — The Global Banned-Books Index [Dataset]. https://morvs.ai/voidly/verboten/ (CC BY 4.0). Built on Banned Books — Open Censorship Core (banned-books.org), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20795629.

BibTeX

@dataset{verboten_2026,
  author       = {{MORVS}},
  title        = {Verboten --- The Global Banned-Books Index},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://morvs.ai/voidly/verboten/},
  note         = {Built on Banned Books --- Open Censorship Core (banned-books.org), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20795629. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD},
  license      = {CC BY 4.0}
}

Which books are banned, where, when, and on whose authority.

The most-banned books in the world

Browse more books

A–F (29)

G–L (38)

M–R (55)

S–Z (51)

Numbers & symbols (2)