1926 sketch of Hundred Acre Wood to be sold alongside four other EH Shepard works
The original map of Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood – “probably the most famous map in English literature” – is expected to sell for up to £150,000 at auction.
EH Shepard’s original 1926 sketch, unseen for nearly half a century, introduced readers to the world of Christopher Robin and his woodland friends in the original book.
Continue reading...Booker prize-winning author predicts climate reality will not be far from scenarios imagined in her post-apocalyptic fiction
Climate change will bring a dystopian future reminiscent of one of her “speculative fictions”, with women bearing the brunt of brutal repression, hunger and war, the Booker prize-winning author Margaret Atwood is to warn.
“This isn’t climate change – it’s everything change,” she will tell an audience at the British Library this week. “Women will be directly and adversely affected by climate change.”
Related: Global climate action must be gender equal | Hilda Heine
Continue reading...Author, 74, says he was treated for ‘unwelcome medical diagnosis’ at cancer hospital
Michael Morpurgo has revealed he has undergone radiotherapy for an “unwelcome medical diagnosis”.
Writing in this week’s Spectator, the author, 74, speaks about being treated at The Royal Marsden – a hospital dedicated to cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Continue reading...A new edition of After Man by Dougal Dixon, a landmark piece of speculative biology which influenced a generation of palaeontologists, has been released
In 1981, a remarkable book was published: After Man: A Zoology of the Future, by Dougal Dixon. As a child of the eighties, growing up in a science fiction bubble where daleks, vogons and the fighting machines of the War of the Worlds were at least as concrete to me as anything happening in the real world, After Man presented a biologically-themed alternative world to lose myself in.
The premise of the book is simple: take the Earth today, remove the humans, and let evolution take its course for 50 million years. What new animals evolve? Of course, in other hands this approach could have resulted in a throwaway romp. In Dixon’s, it produced an incredibly detailed, thoughtful book, in which the principles of evolutionary theory and ecology are rigorously applied. Crypsis (adaptations to avoid being seen by either predators or prey) is a common theme, as is mimicry. And convergent evolution (the idea that unrelated organisms in similar ecological niches evolve similar adaptations) is everywhere. Each species has a scientific name which follows the conventions that taxonomists use, and the text describes their behaviours and inter-species interactions. The striking illustrations, with copious annotations, resemble a naturalist’s field notes.
Continue reading...New documentary shows author confiding that she once struggled to picture ‘a woman wizard’ and that ‘the Earthsea books as feminist literature are a total complete bust’
A new documentary about Ursula K Le Guin shows the late author reflecting on the impact of feminism on her work, revealing that she had been “a woman pretending to think like a man” and that her much-loved Earthsea books “are a total complete bust” as feminist literature.
Le Guin’s first three books about Earthsea centre on the male wizard Ged, with women “either marginal or essentially dependent on men”, according to the author herself. In director Arwen Curry’s forthcoming Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, which Curry worked on with Le Guin for 10 years, the novelist speaks of how when she started writing, “men were at the centre” of fantasy and admits that “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard”.
Continue reading...Fight Club author says his income has dwindled, as Darin Webb is charged with embezzling $3.4m from his literary agency
Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk has said that he is “close to broke” after it emerged that an accountant at his literary agency had been arrested for embezzling $3.4m (£2.5m) from the company.
Darin Webb, an accountant at Donadio and Olson in New York, was charged on 15 May with “defraud[ing] a literary agency during his engagement as that agency’s bookkeeper, by converting funds that belonged to the agency and its clients to his own use”. The charge states that Webb allegedly admitted in video interviews that he prepared monthly financial reports and sent emails to the agency’s clients “that contained false and fraudulent representations, in order to accomplish the theft and evade detection”. The complaint does not name the literary agency, but the name was confirmed to the New York Post by Donadio and Olson’s lawyer.
Continue reading...New documentary shows author confiding that she once struggled to picture ‘a woman wizard’ and that ‘the Earthsea books as feminist literature are a total complete bust’
A new documentary about Ursula K Le Guin shows the late author reflecting on the impact of feminism on her work, revealing that she had been “a woman pretending to think like a man” and that her much-loved Earthsea books “are a total complete bust” as feminist literature.
Le Guin’s first three books about Earthsea centre on the male wizard Ged, with women “either marginal or essentially dependent on men”, according to the author herself. In director Arwen Curry’s forthcoming Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, which Curry worked on with Le Guin for 10 years, the novelist speaks of how when she started writing, “men were at the centre” of fantasy and admits that “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard”.
Continue reading...Prof Blakemore opposes timing of stressful exams in a period of major cognitive changes
Teenagers are being damaged by the British school system because of early start times and exams at 16 when their brains are going through enormous change, a leading neuroscientist has said.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore said it was only in recent years that the full scale of the changes that take place in the adolescent brain has been discovered. “That work has completely revolutionised what we think about this period of life.
Continue reading...Nobel Foundation director says issues at the Swedish Academy, which picks the winner, must be solved before award can be restored
The Nobel prize for literature will not be awarded in 2019 unless trust is restored in the scandal-plagued Swedish Academy, the Nobel Foundation’s executive director has revealed. His admission came just weeks after the 2018 prize was called off in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct, financial malpractice and repeated leaks.
On 4 May, the Swedish Academy – which decides on the winner of the world’s top literary award – announced that it would not be handing out a Nobel prize for literature in 2018, after a series of allegations of sexual harassment and abuse were made against the husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson. The way the academy handled the allegations, which have been denied by Frostenson’s husband, the photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, led to several resignations, leaving it with just 10 active members – with 12 required to elect new ones. In order to “commit time to recovering public confidence”, the academy said that it would instead create two laureates in 2019.
Continue reading...Author of dystopian novel admits she has no control over TV series - but that’s OK
Margaret Atwood has admitted having no control over the TV version of her harrowing novel The Handmaid’s Tale but, she says, she has no problem with that.
“I think I would have to be awfully stupid to resent it because things could have been so much worse,” she told an audience at the Hay literary festival in Wales. “They have done a tippety-top job ... the acting is great, they’ve stuck to the central set of premises.”
Related: The Handmaid's Tale: season two review – a menacing, harrowing return
Related: The future isn't female enough: the problematic feminism of The Handmaid's Tale
Continue reading...At Hay litererary festival, artist and author, 95, reveals added hurdles she faced as a refugee
She is one of the UK’s most beloved authors and illustrators, but Judith Kerr has revealed that the only exam she ever failed was for book illustration.
Speaking at the Hay literary festival in Wales, the 95-year-old author of classics including The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series said she failed illustration while enrolled at a London art school after the end of the second world war.
Continue reading...Paul Caruana Galizia says his father and brothers have not had chance to mourn the death of their mother, Daphne
The Daphne Project: continuing the journalist’s work
The family of the murdered Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia have had little chance to mourn her death because of continuing intimidation, threats and lies, according to her son.
Paul Caruana Galizia, told the Hay literary festival in Wales that it felt like the family was at war with the state seven months after his mother was killed by a car bomb near her home.
Continue reading...New research shows teachers reporting that the vote to leave the EU has hardened monolingual attitudes
Britain faces further isolation after Brexit if it doesn’t adjust its citizens’ attitude towards learning foreign languages, a panel of experts has warned, with Britons becoming increasingly “linguaphobic” in the wake of the EU referendum.
Speaking at the Hay literary festival on Friday, a panel including Cardiff University professor Claire Gorrara and linguist Teresa Tinsley, said that Britons had too long relied on a false belief that English was the world’s lingua franca. Only 6% of the global population are native English speakers, with 75% of the world unable to speak English at all. But three-quarters of UK residents can only speak English.
Related: The Guardian view on languages and the British: Brexit and an Anglosphere prison | Editorial
Continue reading...Sci-fi and the human drive for self-perfection fuel the South Korean artist provocateur’s monstrous creations
Lee Bul’s earliest memories are defined by dust. In a military town outside Seoul, where she lived aged 11, many of the trees had been cut down for fuel, while, under the dictator Park Chung-Hee’s modernisation programme, new roads were begun and abandoned. The inhabitants of her neighbourhood’s cheap and fragile houses came and went: soldiers, farmers who worked the fields surrounding the haphazard development, and “wanderers”, such as Bul’s parents. They were leftwing activists whose home was routinely searched by the police for banned books and needed to live in a place where people weren’t too fussy about their neighbours.
While the world outside was dry, however, home was a Technicolor Oz. As political dissidents, her parents couldn’t attend group gatherings, even at work. Compelled to labour from home, sometimes with neighbours, her mother made handbags from glass beads. “There was another landscape inside our house,” she recalls. “One room with women working with beautiful colours.”
I’m trying to question the modern human with a modern mind, and I can’t find the answer
Related: Techno-terror: Lee Bul’s strange world of Batman caves and vomiting dogs
Continue reading...Titan of television adaptations tells Hay festival he aims to ‘wipe out’ idea of Updike being a misogynist
Andrew Davies, Britain’s most successful literary adaptor for television, has vowed to dispel the idea of John Updike being a misogynist when he tackles the author’s Rabbit series of novels.
Davies is best known for the lavish and acclaimed productions of classic novels such as Doctor Zhivago, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace and the forthcoming Les Misérables.
Continue reading...Two lost essays by Marcel Proust about Parisian high society at the fin de siècle are to be published in English for the first time following their discovery by an American scholar. Of particular significance to academics are their revelations that the great French novelist was exploring ideas for In Search of Lost Time, his autobiographical masterpiece, around 14 years earlier than previously thought.
One essay was unknown, while the other was presumed lost. Both show that the author’s fascination with aristocratic salons and society doyennes developed long before 1913, when he published his seven-part classic of French literature, with the Guermantes family among fictional characters in a narrative about the decline and fall of an aristocratic ideal. One essay, The Great Parisian Salons, dates from 1893 when Proust was just 21, and runs to around 1,850 words. It had been completely overlooked until now because Proust had written it under the pseudonym Tout-Paris in Le Gaulois, a prestigious society journal.
Related: Proust's love letters to composer go on display before Paris auction
Continue reading...The popular novels The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall have made the shortlist of the five best Man Booker prize winners of all time, judges revealed at the Hay Festival in Wales. The public now have until early July to vote for the victor.
The golden Man Booker race celebrates the 50th year of Britain’s leading prize for fiction, taking a single title from each of those decades. Joining Mantel and Ondaatje are VS Naipaul’s In a Free State, which won the prize in 1971, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively from 1987, and the American writer George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which triumphed last year. Among the five judges of the Golden Booker are the poet Lemn Sissay, who chose from the winners of the 1980s, and the writer Robert McCrum, the Observer’s former literary editor, who tackled the 1970s.
Continue reading...Playing Ginny Weasley aged nine was Wright’s first job. Now in her late 20s, she talks about directing her Potter peers and her new AS Byatt Adaptation
An unassuming hairdressing salon in a shopping precinct in Lincoln is an unlikely venue for the world premiere of a film directed by a globally famous actor. But behind a velvet rope, between the washbasins, that is exactly what is happening in Sincil Salon in Sincil Street in Lincoln town centre. The film is called Medusa’s Ankles, and the director is Bonnie Wright – better known to tens of millions as Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter film series.
The venue, in fact, is wholly appropriate: Medusa’s Ankles, adapted from a short story by AS Byatt, is set entirely in a hairdresser’s. It stars Kerry Fox as a woman disconcerted by the signs of ageing – particularly her greying hair, which she is determined to keep “natural” – and Jason Isaacs as a charismatic, bullying hairdresser with whom she has a fraught, fractious relationship. The 20-minute film is showing over three days in the salon, which will be open for normal hairdressing operation throughout.
Continue reading...The disgraced mogul was seen clutching two hardbacks on his way to hand himself over to the authorities. What does this reading matter suggest about his state of mind?
On his way to turn himself into police over sexual assault charges, Harvey Weinstein was filmed carrying three sizeable books, two of which have been identified as Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution by Todd S Purdum, and Elia Kazan: A Biography by Richard Schickel.
Something Wonderful was published last month to some acclaim, and it is easy to imagine Weinstein might see something of himself in the story of successful showmen impresarios credited with changing the cultural landscape.
Harvey Weinstein arrived carrying the book 'Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution' by Todd S. Purdum pic.twitter.com/hItARz3cQR
Continue reading...The senator has doubts about Trump’s moral leadership, but thinks that the US will ‘get through it’, says Mark Salter
The Restless Wave was not meant to be John McCain’s last book. But when the six-term Republican senator from Arizona was diagnosed with brain cancer, what might have been a distillation of the McCain Doctrine evolved into a memoir that offers reflections on his career and a robust defense of the world order he championed for more than three decades in Congress.
“He wanted it to be more reflective and more personal,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s former chief of staff and co-author of The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations, in an interview this week. “Above all he wanted to convey how fortunate he felt he was for being able to serve this country for 60 years in the navy and then Congress.”
Related: The Restless Wave review: John McCain on Trump, duty and Putin's 'evil'
Related: ‘John McCain is not fighting a losing battle’: a senator defends his legacy
Continue reading...Publisher hits £161.5m, driven by Potter sales and Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good
The evergreen Harry Potter franchise and the popularity of TV chef Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good has driven book publisher Bloomsbury’s revenue to the highest level in its 32-year history.
Bloomsbury Publishing reported a 13% surge in revenues to £161.5m in the year to the end of February, its best performance since it was founded in 1986.
Related: Fantastic riches and where to find them: how to grow a $22bn franchise
Related: Brexit will usher in a dark chapter for new British authors, warns publisher
Continue reading...Message to American friend in 2010 pours scorn on ‘ragbag of ivy league Tories’, ‘eco-ostriches’ and ‘born again PR men’ returned to power in UK
John le Carré’s stinging disdain for British politicians is displayed in a caustic letter to an American friend, coming up for auction, which sees him pouring scorn on the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and Labour alike.
The handwritten letter to an obstetrician from Maine was written by the author in August 2010, after the Conservative party had failed to win a majority in the general election and had formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Or as Le Carré astringently put it: “The Etonians have taken back the shop with the help of some B-list inexperienced liberals who will evaporate in their own hot air before long, leaving the shop to a ragbag of ivy league Tories, born again PR men, sexists, anti-Europeans, nostalgists and eco-ostriches.”
Related: From cold war spy to angry old man: the politics of John le Carré
Continue reading...Winter is only the sixth novel ever to be shortlisted for the Orwell, and is up against acclaimed non-fiction titles including The Islamic Enlightenment and Testosterone Rex
Ali Smith’s novel Winter could become the first work of fiction to win the Orwell prize for books in more than a decade, after her riff on A Christmas Carol made the shortlist for the UK’s top award for political writing.
Related: Winter by Ali Smith review – wise, generous and a thing of grace
Related: Cordelia Fine: ‘If women aren’t sweet, then they’re called bitches’
Continue reading...The 95-year-old comic-book creator claims POW! Entertainment executives brokered a ‘sham deal’ with a Chinese company that stole rights to his name
Famed Marvel superhero creator Stan Lee is seeking more than $1bn (£740m) in damages from his former company POW! Entertainment, alleging that he was tricked into signing a document giving away rights to use his name and likeness.
The comic-book legend, who is 95, is suing POW!, its co-founder Gill Champion and chief executive Shane Duffy, alleging they brokered a “sham deal” to sell POW! to a China-based company, Camsing. Duffy is also the vice president of Camsing US.
Thank you twitter. I finally learned how to post a video thanks to you guys. pic.twitter.com/SiSqnNakd9
Continue reading...Author’s startlingly accurate descriptions of illnesses may have assisted advances in medicine, curators say
Fat boy Joe, the messenger in The Pickwick Papers, is “always asleep... he goes on errands fast asleep, and snores as he waits at table”.
The chubby servant’s constant snoozing becomes a running joke in Dickens’ first novel, but the character also served as an unlikely inspiration for a breakthrough in sleep science.
Liu, who has never been charged with a crime, has been under house arrest in China since her late husband Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel peace prize in 2010
Paul Auster, JM Coetzee, Alice Sebold and Khaled Hosseini are among dozens of major writers issuing an urgent call for the Chinese poet and artist Liu Xia to be freed after almost a decade under house arrest.
Liu, 50, has been under house arrest in China since her late husband, the human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, was given the Nobel peace prize in 2010. Chinese authorities insist Liu “enjoys all freedoms in accordance with the law”, but supporters say her movements have been severely restricted and she lives under constant surveillance.
Related: Chinese Nobel laureate's widow 'ready to die' in house arrest
Today, writers and artists come together for one of their own. @khaledhosseini, @PGourevitch, Siri Hustvedt, and Rita Dove read Liu Xia’s poem "June 2, 1989." They—and we—won’t stop calling for her release until she is truly free. @amnesty #FreeLiuXia https://t.co/yqC5MIQGiN pic.twitter.com/gNMpnWvjZX
Continue reading...Long-awaited memorial aims to capture spirit and strength of the original suffragette
The pioneering British artist Maggi Hambling has been chosen for a long-awaited statue commemorating the “foremother of feminism” Mary Wollstonecraft.
The Mary on the Green campaign, which has been calling for a permanent memorial to the philosopher and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman since 2011, unanimously chose Hambling for the sculpture.
Related: Corbyn calls for statue to feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft
Continue reading...Stockbridge branch to open under Waterstones name rather than appearing independent
Waterstones has backtracked on plans to open one of its new unbranded stores in a district of Edinburgh that is already home to an independent bookshop – following an outcry that included criticism from figures including the Scottish novelist Val McDermid.
A shop will be opened in the Stockbridge area of the city but it will be clearly branded as Waterstones, according to the company’s managing director, James Daunt, who admitted: “We messed up.”
Related: Paul Singer: the secretive wizard casting a spell over Waterstones
Related: Waterstones boss James Daunt: 'Books still work and always will'
Continue reading...None of the 62 novels submitted for the 2018 award generated ‘unanimous laughter’ among the jury, so the honour will roll over this year
This year’s new novels are not much of a laugh – at least according to the judges of the UK’s only prize for comic fiction, who have taken the unprecedented decision to withhold the award after failing to be sufficiently amused by the books submitted.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, which has been running since 2000, goes to the novel deemed to best capture the comic spirit of the late PG Wodehouse. In another blow to a year that has already suffered from its fair share of doom and gloom, judges revealed on Wednesday morning that they had not found a book they felt worthy “to join the heady comedic ranks of PG Wodehouse” or of previous winners such as Marina Lewycka or Alexander McCall Smith.
Continue reading...Tributes paid to revered dramatist whose plays include A Whistle in the Dark and Famine
Tributes have been paid to the influential playwright Tom Murphy, who has died at the age of 83. Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins, said Murphy made an “immeasurable and outstanding” contribution to Irish theatre.
Higgins called Murphy, whose works include A Whistle in the Dark and The Sanctuary Lamp, “the great playwright of the emigrant” and said he captured “in a poignant, creative way, the transience that is at the heart of the emigrant experience”.
Related: Playwright Tom Murphy: 'There is a rage within me'
Continue reading...Digital technology helps decipher hidden passages on two pages masked with brown paper
Researchers using digital technology on two pages of Anne Frank’s diary covered over with brown masking paper have discovered passage featuring four risque jokes and candid explanations of sex, contraception and prostitution.
“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” said Frank van Vree, the director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “The dirty jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”
Related: Ex-FBI agent opens cold case review into who betrayed Anne Frank
Continue reading...Best known for books including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital
Tom Wolfe, the essayist, journalist and author of bestselling books including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Bonfire of the Vanities, has died at the age of 87.
Wolfe died in a Manhattan hospital on Monday, his agent Lynn Nesbit confirmed. He had been hospitalised with an infection.
Continue reading...Author looks at 70 composers from Beethoven to Britten, also dismissing alcoholism claims
A retired surgeon’s research into the deaths of 70 of the best-known classical composers has led him to conclude that many of them were unfairly tainted with reputations for “venereal disease, alcoholism or sexual impropriety”.
Jonathan Noble, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, has reviewed material – including letters and diaries where symptoms and ailments are detailed – relating to Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Beethoven and many others, and found that “an awful lot of them have been slighted by music critics and biographers”.
Related: Syphilis, sex and fear | How the French disease conquered the world
Continue reading...Canadian-born actor, who secured screen stardom via blockbusting comic book adaptation, experienced long-term mental health issues
Margot Kidder, whose best known role was as reporter Lois Lane in the 1978 Superman movie has died aged 69. The Franzen Davies funeral home in Montana confirmed her death on Sunday.
Kidder was born in Canada in 1948, and broke into film acting in the late 60s. Her first significant role was in the Gene Wilder comedy Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx in 1970. Brian DePalma cast her as conjoined twins in the cult horror Sisters (1973) before she graduated to a major Hollywood production opposite Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper in 1975.
Continue reading...High-profile author and MP says 3,000-page charge sheet alleging that he contributed to the death of Sunanda Pushkar in 2014 is ‘preposterous’
Shashi Tharoor, a high-profile member of India’s opposition party and a bestselling author, has expressed outrage after police filed charges against him relating to the death of his wife four years ago.
Tharoor’s wife, Sunanda Pushkar, was found dead in a Delhi hotel in January 2014, prompting an investigation by city police. Her death came days after she had claimed on Twitter to have evidence of an affair between Tharoor and a Pakistani journalist. Tharoor and Pushkar later issued a joint statement saying “unauthorised tweets” had been “misrepresented and led to some erroneous conclusions”.
Continue reading...Bookseller under fire for opening unbranded Edinburgh store in competition with existing shop
Waterstones has been accused of breaking a pledge not to open up a new breed of unbranded stores in areas that are already home to independent bookshops after the company announced plans to expand in Edinburgh.
The bookseller is set to open a shop called Stockbridge Books in the Scottish city’s Stockbridge area in the spring of next year, it emerged on Monday.
“It’s about the fact that this will be masquerading as an independent bookshop."
Continue reading...Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
(Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
The 13th Doctor, as played on BBC One by Jodie Whittaker, will also feature in a novel and a short story by the two acclaimed authors
The award-winning authors Naomi Alderman and Juno Dawson are stepping into the Tardis, writing fiction featuring Jodie Whittaker as the 13th incarnation of Doctor Who.
Whittaker’s first series starring as the 13th Doctor will launch on BBC One this autumn. Alderman, who won the Baileys prize for her dystopian novel The Power, is writing a new short story featuring Whittaker’s Doctor “battling to save the universe alongside her close and trusted friends”. It will be included in the collection Thirteen Doctors, 13 Stories, due out in November.
Continue reading...Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) by Rev Gilbert White inspired generations of naturalists including Charles Darwin
A book that influenced Charles Darwin and is reputedly the fourth most published work in the English language is to be made available online in its entirety.
The 1789 book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by the Reverend Gilbert White, has inspired generations of naturalists with the vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna - as well as the weather and crops - the author encountered in the countryside around his Hampshire home.
Continue reading...The 13th Doctor, as played on BBC One by Jodie Whittaker, will also feature in a novel and a short story by the two acclaimed authors
The award-winning authors Naomi Alderman and Juno Dawson are stepping into the Tardis, writing fiction featuring Jodie Whittaker as the 13th incarnation of Doctor Who.
Whittaker’s first series starring as the 13th Doctor will launch on BBC One this autumn. Alderman, who won the Baileys prize for her dystopian novel The Power, is writing a new short story featuring Whittaker’s Doctor “battling to save the universe alongside her close and trusted friends”. It will be included in the collection Thirteen Doctors, 13 Stories, due out in November.
Continue reading...Everything About You by Heather Child, Hunted by GX Todd, The Body Library by Jeff Noon, 84K by Claire North, The Rig by Roger Levy
Heather Child’s debut novel, Everything About You (Orbit, £14.99), reads as though the author has travelled to the future and returned with an itemised report. We are in near-future Britain, and Child has extrapolated from current trends in social media to catalogue the pitfalls and benefits of a world in which most citizens take part in various forms of virtual reality and smartware curates everyone’s identity. The novel begins eight years after Freya’s 17-year-old stepsister, Ruby, vanished without trace, and Freya has been living with a burden of guilt and grief. When she borrows her ex-boyfriend’s Smartface hardware, its algorithms trawl the datasphere and provide Freya with a default virtual helpmate – a construct based on her sister’s old online presence. The novel is low on plot but high on acute psychological observation as Child skilfully portrays Freya’s growing identification with her missing sister’s virtual alter ego, while she investigates what happened to her. Everything About You is a captivating and assured first novel.
Continue reading...Lawyers for the late novelist, and for producers of Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation, have agreed a deal that will allow the show to open in December
Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is set to go ahead in December, after the estate of Harper Lee and the play’s producers “amicably settled” their lawsuits.
The late author’s estate had filed a lawsuit in Alabama in March, claiming that Sorkin’s script made too many changes to Lee’s characters, in particular that of the lawyer Atticus Finch. According to the lawsuit, the estate had told producer Scott Rudin’s company Rudinplay that “for this classic, it is really important that any spin put on the characters, not least Atticus, does not contradict the author’s image of them”. It said that Lee herself portrayed Atticus as “a model of wisdom, integrity and professionalism”, citing an interview in which Sorkin called the lawyer an apologist for the racists around him.
Continue reading...Kumukanda, the Zambian-British author’s collection exploring black masculinity, wins £30,000 award for authors aged 39 or under
The Zambian-British writer Kayo Chingonyi’s exploration of black masculinity in his debut poetry collection Kumukanda has won him the £30,000 Dylan Thomas award.
The Swansea University International Dylan Thomas prize is awarded each year for the best literary work by an author aged 39 or under – the age the beloved Welsh poet was when he died. Chingonyi, who is 31, is the first British poet to win the genre-straddling award, which has gone in the past to Max Porter’s novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers and Fiona McFarlane’s short-story collection The High Places.
Related: Man Booker prize 2017 and poet Kayo Chingonyi – books podcast
Continue reading...Richard Lloyd Parry takes £20,000 award for book that brings together six years spent collecting firsthand accounts of the catastrophe’s impact
It knocked the Earth six-and-a-half inches off its axis and moved Japan four metres closer to the US: a “harrowing and inspiring” account of the 2011 tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people in Japan has won the Folio prize.
Related: The school beneath the wave: the unimaginable tragedy of Japan’s tsunami
Continue reading...Fameela Hopkins, whose works include Cocky Romantic and Cocky Cowboy, is said to have written to other writers asserting her right to the adjective in titles
Romance novelists have risen en masse to defend their right to use the word “cocky”, after one writer moved to trademark the adjective.
Faleena Hopkins is the self-published author of a series of books about the “Cocker Brothers” (“Six bad boy brothers you’ll want to marry or hide under you [sic] bed”), each of which features the word “cocky” in the title: Cocky Romantic, Cocky Biker, Cocky Cowboy. On Saturday, author Bianca Sommerland posted a YouTube video sharing allegations that Hopkins had written to authors whose books also had titles including the word “cocky”, informing them that she had been granted the official registered trademark of the adjective in relation to romance books, and asking them to rename their novels or face legal action.
The message I received from "Cocky Gate". #freecocky #cockygate #rwa pic.twitter.com/HzAr4Qr9Ii
Continue reading...The Pulitzer prize-winning author has been accused of sexual misconduct by author Zinzi Clemmons on Twitter after revealing last month that he had been raped as a child
The Pulitzer prize-winning author Junot Díaz has been accused of sexual harassment by writer Zinzi Clemmons.
Related: Junot Díaz reveals he was raped as a child in New Yorker essay
As a grad student, I invited Junot Diaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature. I was an unknown wide-eyed 26 yo, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me. I'm far from the only one he's done this 2, I refuse to be silent anymore.
Continue reading...Decision follows string of sexual assault allegations made against husband of former member of the Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy, which has become mired in controversy over its links to a man accused of sexual assault, announced on Friday morning that there would be no Nobel laureate for literature selected in 2018, as it attempts to come to terms with the unprecedented fallout.
For the first time in 75 years, the secretive jury that hands out the world’s most prestigious literary award will not unveil a winner this autumn, instead revealing two winners in 2019. The decision, announced at 9am Swedish time following a meeting on Thursday, comes after a string of sexual assault allegations made against the French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of academy member and poet Katarina Frostenson.
Related: Public fights, resignations and a sex scandal: what's going on with the Nobel prize?
Continue reading...Academic discovers contributions to the translation by Isaac Casaubon, who helped with knotty translation questions despite speaking little English
A scholar has discovered that the King James Bible includes work by a previously unsuspected French translator, whose contribution to the quintessentially English work has lain undetected for 400 years.
The landmark work, first published in 1611, was drafted by more than 40 translators. But according to Dr Nicholas Hardy from the University of Birmingham, few documents survive from the drafting and revision stages of the translation and little is known about how the translators worked together.
Related: Passages from the Bible discovered behind Qur'an manuscript
Continue reading...Miller’s essay has been withdrawn after divisive reception, but supporters say it is part of a necessary conversation about race and privilege
An incendiary essay by the award-winning Jamaican poet Kei Miller that probed at white women writers’ authority to speak for the Caribbean has been pulled from a new magazine after laying bare a long-festering anger in the islands’ literary community.
Miller’s essay, The White Women and the Language of Bees, was published last week in Pree, a new magazine highlighting writers from the Caribbean. Asking “how many years and decades must pass before we can belong to a place and to its words? How much time before we can write it?”, the essay saw the Forward prize-winning author discuss his interactions with four white women writers from the region, evaluating their books, and the way they have interacted with the local literary community.
We’re all trying to write, to draw inspiration from this place ... That doesn’t mean we can’t ask hard questions
All of this is about if people get to write because they’re white... What is considered a valid Commonwealth story?
Continue reading...Speaking on BBC radio the author, who has written in the past about his father beating his mother, said the violence had ‘burned his conscience’
Acclaimed author and poet Benjamin Zephaniah has admitted that he hit a former girlfriend.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Zephaniah, who is one of Britain’s best-known poets, confessed that in the past he had been violent to a partner. “The way I treated some of my girlfriends was terrible. At one point I was violent. I was never like one of these persons who have a girlfriend, who’d constantly beat them, but I could lose my temper sometimes,” he told presenter Nihal Arthanayake. “There was one girlfriend that I had, and I actually hit her a couple of times, and as I got older I really regretted it. It burned my conscience so badly. It really ate at me, you know. And I’m a meditator. It got in the way of my meditation.”
Related: ‘I went off the rails’: how Benjamin Zephaniah went from borstal to poet
Continue reading...Analysis of more than 2m titles shows that on average, male authors’ work is strikingly better valued
A study of more than 2m books has revealed that titles by female authors are on average sold at just over half the price of those written by men.
The research, by sociologist Dana Beth Weinberg and mathematician Adam Kapelner of Queens College-CUNY, looked titles published in North America between 2002 and 2012. The authors analysed the gender of each author by matching names to lists of male and female names, and cross-referenced with information about price, genre and publication.
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