Know a 'gomer' from a 'DSTO'? Oxford Dictionary appeals for work slang

Reference book calls for public’s help to source fresh specialist vernacular from across working life

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is launching a public appeal to help illuminate the sometimes impenetrable terminology used by different professions, from healthcare workers’ calling difficult patients “gomers” (an acronym for Get Out of My Emergency Room) to what exactly builders are up to when they “dob and dab”.

On Thursday, the dictionary called on doctors, firefighters, builders, shopkeepers, teachers, plumbers, marketers and other workers to send in the words and expressions they use at work. “The OED already includes many terms from all kinds of trades and professions but there are many more that have not yet come to our attention – and that’s why we’re asking for your help,” it said.

Related: Squaring the circle on jargon. Why do we speak in riddles at work?

Continue reading...

Dylan Thomas prize: teacher and nurse among 'starburst' of young talent

Sally Rooney, Sarah Perry and Michael Donkor among those longlisted for £30,000 prize for books by writers aged 39 or under

From the critically acclaimed debut of Emma Glass, a 31-year-old still working as a nurse, to the first book by 33-year-old Michael Donkor, who currently teaches English in a London secondary school, a “starburst of young literary talent” makes up the longlist for the largest prize in the world for young authors.

Given to the best literary work in English by an author aged 39 or under, the £30,000 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas prize is named after the beloved Welsh poet, who died at the age of 39. It is intended to “invoke his memory to support the writers of today and nurture the talents of tomorrow”.

Related: Emma Glass: ‘I hope my book will help people find the language of the ordeal’

Continue reading...

Undiscovered Merlin tale fragments found in Bristol archives

Handwritten 13th-century parchment pieces spotted in unrelated work at library

An intriguing, previously unknown 13th-century version of a tale featuring Merlin and King Arthur has been discovered in the archives of Bristol central library.

The seven handwritten fragments of parchment were unearthed bound inside an unrelated volume of the work of a 15th- century French scholar.

Continue reading...

Women write fantasy for grown-ups, too

Why are female authors’ adult fantasy novels so often marketed at teenagers?

Why are adult fantasy novels by women often marketed at teenagers? This is the question an article on the website BookRiot has posited, arguing that unconscious sexism is to blame. “As more women’s novels get mistakenly classified as young adult, it furthers the message that grownup fantasy and sci-fi are for men. Sure, women can write for teens who like The Hunger Games, but for the ‘real’ fantasy readers? Try again,” wrote Mya Nunnally.

Sexism exists in science fiction and fantasy: until recently, the genre has remained stubbornly white and male but for the rise of authors including Nnedi Okorafor or NK Jemisin. Every time the Guardian runs reviews of sci-fi by women, commenters invariably debate whether it is sci-fi at all. But while YA fiction as we know it has been around since the 1950s, many of the popular series share common features: fantasy-romance blends usually led by a feisty-but-relatable young woman who, in between interspecies/inter-kingdom battles, will fall in love with a male friend, with whom she will eventually hit the heights of heavy petting in, perhaps, book three.

Continue reading...

via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HHKiJ0

Melbourne University Publishing CEO quits over 'narrow' new focus

Louise Adler and four board members resign as university decides to change direction

Melbourne University Publishing’s CEO and members of its board of directors have resigned in protest against the university’s proposed new strategy for the publishing house that, according to one former board member, would render it “narrow” and “cloistered”.

Louise Adler, MUP’s CEO and the powerhouse personality behind the publishing house since 2003, has put in her resignation, along with four members of its board of directors including the chairman, Laurie Muller, the former NSW premier Bob Carr, the former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs, and Tony Peake, effective Thursday. Danny Gorog, whose term on the board ends on the same day, will also step down. The rest of the board continues in their roles.

If you're @unimelb student or staff: Ask serious questions about value your university places upon editorial independence. Ask serious questions about decisions being made. & ask yourself questions we're taught at journalism school: WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY? @MUPublishing

Related: Summer beach reads: 10 Australian books set by the sea

About Louise Adler, who has resigned from MUP because of truly gobsmacking editorial pressure from uni mgment. When I wrote a column in May 2017 she texted that weekend and said: "You have a book in you." I had that book in me for two decades. She saw it, she published it.

This is big news in Australian publishing circles. MUP and @louiseadler are outstanding commissioners and editors of books and wonderful mentors to their authors; even the clueless first-timers like me. https://t.co/z3pwaLbxXj

Continue reading...

Dr Seuss's thank-you letter to man who saved his first book

The Cat in the Hat author was going to destroy early story believing it was unsaleable

A grateful letter from Dr Seuss to the former college classmate who stopped The Cat in the Hat author from burning his first children’s book manuscript is set to be auctioned later this week.

Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, was an advertising artist who had written his first tale for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1936. It had been rejected by dozens of publishers when he bumped into Mike McClintock. As he writes in a 1957 letter to his old friend from Dartmouth College: “You picked me off Madison Ave with a manuscript that I was about to burn in my incinerator because nobody would buy it. And you not only told me how to put Mulberry Street together properly … (as you did later with the 500 Hats), but after you’d sweated this out with me, giving me the best and only good information I have ever had on the construction of a book for this mysterious market, you even took the stuff on the road and sold it.”

Related: How Dr Seuss could simplify boring, wordy documents

Continue reading...

The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es wins Costa book of the year

Book’s subject, Lien de Jong, 85, who survived second world war ordeal, attends ceremony

The 85-year-old Lien de Jong, whose harrowing childhood living in hiding with a Dutch foster family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands is pieced together in Bart van Es’s biography The Cut Out Girl, was at the Costa awards on Tuesday to watch the Oxford academic collect the £30,000 Costa book of the year award for a book telling the story of her life, which judges called “incredibly important”.

Related: Costa biography prize winner Bart van Es and Mathias Énard – books podcast

Related: The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es review – a moving account of wartime survival

Continue reading...

Jacaranda reveals plans to publish 20 black British writers in 2020

Indie publisher says its #Twentyin2020 initiative will cover fiction, non-fiction and poetry and help ‘normalise’ diverse readers

A group of unnamed individuals has donated £25,000 towards an independent publisher’s initiative to publish 20 black British writers in 2020, in the hope it will “normalise” black writing and authors in the UK.

London independent publisher Jacaranda set out to find 20 black British writers in 2018, going through more than 100 submissions to pin down a list that spans from DD Armstrong’s reworking of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which relocates the story of brotherhood and betrayal to modern inner-city London, to Tolu Agbelusi’s poetry collection Locating Strong Women. Jacaranda founder Valerie Brandes described the list as “a fine mix of established, recognised names and brand new voices delivering brilliant fiction, non-fiction and poetry”.

Continue reading...

The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams to become stage musical

Following in the footsteps of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, the book is to be adapted by the Royal Shakespeare Company

David Walliams’ journey from comedian to one of the most popular children’s authors of his generation is to continue, with a musical version of his first book destined for the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

On Monday, the company announced details of a stage version of Walliams’s bestselling novel The Boy in the Dress, which tells the story of a schoolboy who cross-dresses to help him cope with the death of his mother.

Related: Five days, 110,000 books sold: how does David Walliams do it?

Continue reading...

No more Americans? What a new sponsor could mean for the Man Booker prize

Hedge fund’s departure as £1.6m backer of the UK’s leading fiction award has prompted feverish speculation about the prize’s future

Previous Man Booker prize winners are among those keenly awaiting the announcement of the new sponsor of the prestigious literary award, after the prize’s sponsor of almost two decades, Man Group, became the latest in a wave of companies pulling out of backing book prizes.

The hedge fund, which has sponsored the £50,000 literary award since 2002, announced on Sunday that it would end its association with the prize after 2019, which cost them £1.6m a year. On Sunday, the Booker Prize Foundation said that its trustees are already in discussions with a new sponsor “and are confident that new funding will be in place for 2020”.

Continue reading...

Booker prize trustees search for new sponsor after funding dropped

Man Group says it plans to focus its resources instead on its diversity campaign

The Man Booker prize is searching for a new sponsor after hedge fund giant Man Group announced it is ending its 18-year union with Britain’s most prestigious literary award.

The Booker Prize Foundation said its trustees are already in discussion with a new sponsor, “and are confident that new funding will be in place for 2020”.

Related: Has the Booker prize lost its mojo?

Continue reading...

An old man and a plea: Hemingway’s wish for stage version of book fulfilled

The American novelist’s biographer, aged 101, has written a new play based on The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway won a Pulitzer and a Nobel prize for The Old Man and the Sea, and his 1952 novella is still regarded as a classic of world literature. Yet the great American writer remained unsatisfied with its legacy and always hoped to see a faithful stage or screen version made.

Now, six and a half decades on, a close friend whom Hemingway once asked to adapt the story for him has made good on his promise. The journalist and playwright AE Hotchner, the writer’s confidant and fishing companion in Cuba during the period in which the novella was written, has created a stage version with his son.

Continue reading...

Europe 'coming apart before our eyes', say 30 top intellectuals

Group of historians and writers publish manifesto warning against rise of populism

• Fight for Europe – or the wreckers will destroy it
  

Liberal values in Europe face a challenge “not seen since the 1930s”, leading intellectuals from 21 countries have said, as the UK lurches towards Brexit and nationalists look set to make sweeping gains in EU parliamentary elections.

The group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates declared in a manifesto published in several newspapers, including the Guardian, that Europe as an idea was “coming apart before our eyes”.

Related: Fight for Europe – or the wreckers will destroy it | Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan Pamuk and Bernard-Henri Lévy

Continue reading...

Jayant Kaikini's No Presents Please wins DSC prize for south Asian literature

Writer sees off competition from Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid with award for his collection of Mumbai-set short stories

The poet and short story writer Jayant Kaikini has beaten internationally acclaimed writers including Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid to win the DSC prize for south Asian literature.

Kaikini’s No Presents Please, a collection of stories set in Mumbai, was originally written in the southern Indian language of Kannada and translated into English by the award-winning translator Tejaswini Niranjana. The $25,000 (£19,100) prize, which rewards the best writing about south Asian culture from writers of any ethnicity and from all over the world, will be split equally between author and translator.

Continue reading...

Poetry pharmacy set to open in Shropshire

The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma, plans to dispense literary first aid from a shop in Bishop’s Castle

Following in the hallowed footsteps of Milton, who wrote in 1671 that “apt words have power to swage / The tumours of a troubled mind / And are as balm to festered wounds”, the poet Deborah Alma is preparing to open the UK’s first poetry pharmacy. Here, instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered prescriptions of Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop.

Alma, who as the “Emergency Poet” has prescribed poems as cures from the back of a 1970s ambulance for the last six years, is now setting up a permanent outlet in a shop at Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire. An old Edwardian ironmonger’s, it still has the original fixtures and fittings, and, together with her partner, the TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet James Sheard, Alma is preparing to turn it into a haven “to help ease a variety of maladies with the soothing therapy of Poetry”.

Continue reading...

Diana Athill on her best and worst life moments – video

Diana Athill, who has died aged 101, was one of publishing’s most remarkable editors, but in the latter part of her life, it was her own writing that brought her much-enjoyed literary success. In all her work, observations were clear-sighted and seemed truthful, even when they exposed her emotional frailties. She rose to the challenge, as Ian Jack wrote in the introduction to Life Class, of Jean Rhys’s phrase to ‘get it as it was, as it really was’. In an interview on the Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People, she talked about her best and worst moments

• Diana Athill, writer and editor, dies aged 101
  

Continue reading...

EL James returns with 'passionate new romance' The Mister

Fifty Shades of Grey author promises a Cinderella story for the 21st century

EL James, whose controversial erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey explored the disturbing relationship between a student and a businessman, has written her first novel looking beyond the desires of Christian Grey: the “thrilling and sensuous” The Mister.

Out on 16 April, and moving between London, Cornwall and the Balkans, The Mister will delve into the attraction which forms between the “privileged and aristocratic” young Englishman Maxim Trevelyan, and the “mysterious, talented and beautiful” Alessia Demachi, a woman who has arrived in London “owning little more than a dangerous and troublesome past”, said publisher Arrow.

Continue reading...

Shaun Ryder to publish lyrics collection through Faber

Wrote for Luck showcases words of Happy Mondays songwriter hailed in Madchester years ‘on a par with Yeats’

Shaun Ryder, the Happy Mondays songwriter who immortalised the phrase “You’re twistin’ my melon, man”, has announced a book collecting lyrics from across his four-decade career.

Faber will publish Wrote for Luck in their lyrics collection series, which has also published anthologies of works by Kate Bush, Jarvis Cocker and Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant.

Related: Britpop is back! What's behind the 90s music revival?

Continue reading...

Diana Athill, writer and editor, dies aged 101

Centenarian writer and editor won acclaim for ‘nannying’ authors such as Margaret Atwood and VS Naipaul, and for the sharp insights of her own books

Writer and editor Diana Athill, whose clear eye on life and literature inspired authors and readers alike, has died after a short illness aged 101. The news was confirmed by the publisher Granta.

Athill combined a glittering career in publishing, where she worked with writers including Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul, with award-winning success as an author herself, turning her flinty gaze on love, work and approaching death in memoirs including Instead of a Letter, Stet and the Costa biography prize-winning Somewhere Towards the End.

Continue reading...

Medieval book coffer shows appetite for mobile reading 'is nothing new'

Bodleian acquires rare box dated to late 1400s, saying it reveals preoccupation with accessing information on the move is centuries-old

Somewhat less portable than today’s mobile information devices, a rare French gothic coffer dating to the late 1400s that was used to transport books has been acquired by Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries.

Continue reading...

Guillermo del Toro leads drive to save horror bookshop Dark Delicacies

Pan’s Labyrinth director joins Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and other readers in crowdfunding rescue of ‘amazing quarter-century institution’

A horror bookshop in California has been saved from closure after a host of high-profile fans including Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro and Cory Doctorow offered their support.

Dark Delicacies in Burbank, California, has been running since 1994, but co-owner Del Howison said the business had been put under enormous financial strain over the last few years, thanks to “skyrocket[ing]” rents. The store’s lease was up in May, and he and his wife Sue had “resigned ourselves to the fact that we would be forced to close, just shy of our 25th anniversary. We were heartbroken,” he wrote on GoFundMe, where he launched an appeal last week to raise $20,000 (£15,000) to move the shop to a new location around the corner.

Continue reading...

Jane Austen? Family say note establishes disputed portrait's identity

Personal ‘history’ believed to have been written by the novelist’s grand-niece is ‘absolutely emphatic about the fact it’s a portrait’ of the novelist

An overlooked note that may have been written by Jane Austen’s great-niece Fanny Caroline Lefroy could put an end to the long-running question mark over an oil painting its owners believe is a depiction of the novelist as a teenager – a claim that has long been disputed by art experts.

Showing a young girl in a flowing white muslin dress with a cap of brown hair and a charming half-smile, the painting is owned by the Rice family, direct descendants of one of Austen’s brothers. The Rices claim it shows Austen herself, and that it was commissioned from the portrait painter Ozias Humphry in 1788, when 12-year-old Jane and her sister Cassandra were taken to visit their great-uncle Francis in Kent. According to the Rices, Humphry’s 1788 accounts, now held at the British Library, list a bill to Francis Austen for 13 guineas.

Continue reading...

Mario Vargas Llosa quits writers' body over Catalan remarks

Nobel laureate resigns after Pen International calls for release of jailed Catalan leaders

The Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, has resigned as emeritus president of Pen International after the writers’ freedom of expression group called for the release of two jailed Catalan civil society leaders, claiming Catalans have recently been persecuted “in a way not seen since the Franco dictatorship”.

Jordi Cuixart, the president of Òmnium Cultural, and Jordi Sànchez, former president of the powerful grassroots group the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), have been in pre-trial detention since October 2017.

Continue reading...

Acclaimed German novel banned by Nazis gets first English translation

Friedo Lampe’s At the Edge of Night was condemned in 1933 for its homoerotic story but has won growing renown for its magical realism

A novel banned by the Nazis in the 1930s for its homoerotic content is to appear in English for the first time next month.

At the Edge of Night, by Friedo Lampe, was first published in 1933. Set on a September evening on the waterfront of a German city, it is seen today as an early work of magical realism but was seized by the Nazis and pulled from sale. The regime objected to the novel’s inclusion of homoerotic content, and its depiction of an interracial liaison between a black man and a German woman. The book was placed on their list of “damaging and undesirable writings”.

Continue reading...

Ben Bailey Smith (AKA Doc Brown) webchat – follow it live

Bradford libraries face further £2m cuts

Beleaguered service is facing fresh funding squeeze, with budget set to shrink by two-thirds and professional staff under threat

Bradford’s libraries are facing a £2m cut over the next two years, reducing funding by two-thirds and raising fears of widespread job losses, and for the continued provision of the service in the West Yorkshire district.

Plans to turn existing libraries into “community hubs” are due to be put before the council on Tuesday, including proposals to share resources with other local authorities and cut the book-buying budget by 30% in the next financial year.

Continue reading...

The Wall by John Lanchester review – ‘The Others are coming’

From Brexit to migration, this masterly climate change dystopia explores contemporary fears with a blend of realism and metaphor

“It’s cold on the Wall.” What kind of story might be signalled by such an opening sentence? An adventure set in Roman Britain, perhaps – something by Rudyard Kipling or Rosemary Sutcliff, complete with centurions and mists over northern crags. Or a fable of the sort that Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino might have written: a sombre meditation on the correlation between civilisation and frontier systems, composed in the voice of a Confucian scholar exiled to the steppes, plangent with echoes of Chinese poetry. Most obviously, in 2019 any mention of a chilly wall with a capital W is bound to conjure up images of George RR Martin’s Night’s Watch, standing guard amid the snows of northernmost Westeros. Historical fiction, fable, fantasy: the wall is an image potent enough to serve the needs of an entire range of genres.

John Lanchester, in the first pages of his new novel, makes knowing play with this. It is not immediately clear where his wall is, nor why it should be so cold. A mention of trains and lorries is soon a signpost that we are not on Hadrian’s Wall, but beyond that the setting remains opaque. There are Captains, there are Sergeants, there are Corporals. Our narrator, it gradually emerges, is a man called Kavanagh, sent to the Wall for an obligatory two-year term of service. As a Defender, his duty is to stare out to sea, and keep watch for people referred to only as Others. Much hangs on his ability to spot them: for every Other who makes it across the Wall, a Defender will be expelled from the country, put out to sea on a boat. The ominous sense of jeopardy that this establishes hangs like a shadow over the entire book.

Anxiety about the fertility of migrants has been a constant in apocalyptic fiction

Continue reading...

via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FOq3qi

Stonewall defends 'vital' LGBT children's books after spate of ban attempts

In the last week, separate moves in Canada and the US threatened to restrict young readers’ access to LGBT-themed illustrated stories

UK campaign group Stonewall has warned that children’s books depicting LGBT people are vital for the wellbeing of young people exploring their sexual orientation and gender identity, following a spate of attempts around the world to remove titles depicting gay or transgender characters from library shelves.

Earlier this week in Canada, the Ottawa Catholic School Board was reported to have pulled Raina Telgemeier’s acclaimed graphic novel Drama from the shelves of primary schools, moving it to middle and high schools where it would “more appropriately target 13+ students”. Aimed at children aged 10 and older, the book follows a girl who wants to help with her school play, and features a side story in which two boys kiss. It has proved controversial in the US in the past, with the American Library Association naming it as one of the country’s most challenged books.

Related: My trans picture book was challenged – but the answer to hate speech is more speech

Continue reading...

Mary Oliver, Pulitzer prize-winning poet, dies aged 83

The poet, known for her nature and wildlife-themed work, died at her home from lymphoma

Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet whose rapturous odes to nature and animal life brought her critical acclaim and popular affection, has died. She was 83. Bill Reichblum, Oliver’s literary executor, says she died Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida. The cause of death was lymphoma.

Author of more than 15 poetry and essay collections, Oliver wrote brief, direct pieces that sang of her worship of the outdoors and disdain for greed, despoilment and other human crimes. One of her favorite adjectives was “perfect”, and rarely did she apply it to people. Her muses were owls and butterflies, frogs and geese, the changes of the seasons, the sun and the stars.

Related: In troubling times, it’s best to turn to your inner poet | Ruth Padel

Continue reading...

Sherrilyn Kenyon accuses husband of 'Shakespearean plot' to poison her

In an explosive lawsuit, author of bestselling Dark-Hunter novels accuses her husband and two others of attempting to destroy her career

Bestselling urban fantasy novelist Sherrilyn Kenyon has filed a lawsuit against her husband that accuses him of poisoning her for financial gain, as well as attempting to destroy her career and reputation, in what she described as a “Shakespearean plot against her”.

Kenyon, author of the chart-topping Dark-Hunter series, is suing Lawrence R Kenyon II, as well as two individuals employed by the Kenyons, for up to $20m (£15.5m).

Continue reading...

Amazon hits back at claims it is to blame for falling author earnings

Retailer insists Authors Guild report that criticised the online giant for contributing to tumbling writers’ incomes used flawed figures, but Guild stands by findings

Amazon has called the conclusions of a recent report into US author earnings flawed, after the Authors Guild suggested that the retail giant’s dominance could be partly responsible for the “a crisis of epic proportions” affecting writers in the US.

The report from the writers’ body, published last week, highlighted the statistic that median income from writing-related work fell to $6,080 (£4,730) in 2017, down 42% from 2009, with literary authors particularly affected. Raising “serious concerns about the future of American literature”, the writers’ body singled out the growing dominance of Amazon for particular blame. “Amazon (which now controls 72% of the online book market in the US) puts pressure on [publishers] to keep costs down and takes a large percentage, plus marketing fees, forcing publishers to pass on their losses to authors,” said the report.

Related: Crashing author earnings 'threaten future of American literature'

Continue reading...

Publishers failing to improve racial and regional diversity, survey finds

Despite concentration of publishers in London, only 11% of respondents identified as BAME – significantly lower than average of 40% in the city

A major survey of the UK’s publishing workforce has found that “significant progress” still needs to be made on both the numbers of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff and improving regional diversity, with the majority of those working in the industry coming from London and the south east.

According to the survey of 6,432 individuals working for 42 organisations, which the Publishers Association described as the most comprehensive ever conducted of the UK industry, 11.6% of respondents identified as BAME – lower than the UK population (14%), and significantly lower than London (40.2%). The results echo those of a 2017 online survey of 1,000 publishers that found 90% of the workforce was white.

Continue reading...

Peter Greenaway to build racetrack tribute to Jack Kerouac book

Film director working on vast art installation inspired by cult classic On the Road

He trained as an artist and has found inspiration in Old Master paintings in making some of British cinema’s most avant-garde films. Now director Peter Greenaway is working on perhaps his most ambitious artwork so far – an actual racetrack as a vast outdoor art installation.

It will be a tribute to Jack Kerouac’s cult classic On the Road, a story of a hedonistic road trip across America, as Greenaway seeks to re-create Kerouac’s sense of adventure for the 21st century, as well as raising questions about “the future of our roads and how we are going to use them”.

Continue reading...

Short story in 1894 journal may be lost James Connolly play

Academics believe story about Scottish dockworkers strike was written by Irish republican

An anonymous short story centred on a 19th-century Scottish dockworkers strike could solve the mystery of a lost play by the Irish republican James Connolly, academics believe.

No script has ever been found of the missing play, The Agitator’s Wife, which was first alluded to in a 1935 memoir by Connolly’s daughter Nora.

Continue reading...

'A star is born': TS Eliot prize goes to Hannah Sullivan's debut

Poet’s ‘absolutely exhilarating’ first collection Three Poems takes £25,000 prize

Poet Hannah Sullivan has won the prestigious and lucrative TS Eliot prize for her first collection Three Poems – just the third debut to land the award in its 25-year history, and a sign that the poetry world is hunting for a new generation of voices.

Sullivan, a 39-year-old Londoner who won the £25,000 prize on Monday night, is the third first time poet to take the prize, with all three winning in the last five years: Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong in 2017 and Chinese-British Sarah Howe in 2015. Before then, the prize had tended to be awarded to more established poets a few collections into their careers, among them Derek Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

Related: Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan – review

Continue reading...

Stephen Fry and PEN urge UAE to free Ahmed Mansoor ahead of book festival

In a letter to the Guardian, authors and activists draw attention to plight of jailed human rights activist

Stephen Fry is among a range of signatories, including British MPs and campaign groups, to a letter calling for the release of jailed Emirati human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor.

The letter to the Guardian comes as a spotlight falls on the authors planning to attend this year’s Emirates Airline festival of literature in Dubai, tickets for which went on sale at the weekend.

Related: 'It's a very big torture': the children growing up in hiding in Dubai | Katie McQue

Continue reading...

Stephen King's horror prompts book review rethink by Portland paper

Press Herald turns tweet aghast at plan to drop Maine content into chance to attract 100 digital subscriptions

A Maine newspaper that horrified the bestselling author Stephen King by dropping its local book review coverage used his complaint to boost digital subscriptions.

Related: 'Judge me by the enemies I have made': Comey and Trump share FDR quote

Continue reading...

Cat Person fame was 'annihilating', reveals Kristen Roupenian

Recalling the viral success of her short story about sex and modern dating, Roupenian says attention was both a dream and a nightmare

A year after her short story Cat Person was debated and picked apart by millions of readers around the world, the author Kristen Roupenian has recalled what it was like dealing with the scrutiny that came with her sudden prominence.

Writing in the New Yorker, which first published Cat Person in December 2017, the American writer explains she had only been published in small journals before she debuted in the magazine with her story about Margot and Robert, framed around a single bad date.

Continue reading...

The best recent science fiction and fantasy – review roundup

Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox; The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan; The Girl King by Mimi Yu; AfroSFv3 edited by Ivor W Hartmann and All the Lonely People by David Owen

Our Child of the Stars (Quercus) by first-time novelist Stephen Cox takes a number of well worn science fiction tropes – a crash-landed starship, an alien survivor up against the odds, and a big, bad government out to quash the rights of the individual – and invests them with a new energy thanks to some sympathetic characterisation and fine storytelling. What is thought to be a meteor falls to Earth near a US town; nurse Molly Myers is called on to help an injured child who turns out to be the only survivor of a crashed extraterrestrial vessel. When government officials arrive to investigate the crash site and arrest a colleague of Molly’s for hampering their work, she and her husband Gene flee with the alien and attempt to keep one step ahead of their pursuers. What makes this such a satisfying read, apart from the thrillingly rendered chase (and the refreshing notion that not all aliens are bent on inimical invasion), is the characterisation of Molly and Gene, a childless couple given this one miraculous chance to show love for an adopted son. This is an optimistic take on the ET theme, done without the schmaltz of the film.

Continue reading...

via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2VGWi0t

'Poetry is the antidote': in fight against Hindu nationalism, India turns to verse

Buoyed by social media, Urdu poetry is enjoying new popularity in the face of divisive sectarian politics

In a Delhi hockey stadium in December, around 100,000 people of various ages, genders, and classes flooded in for two days of poetry, debates, food and calligraphy sessions. It was Jashn-e-Rekhta, a three-day Urdu cultural festival, and its popularity reflects a wider appreciation for the Urdu poetry known as shayari. Historically associated with the politics of resistance, shayari is experiencing a revival in the face of rising Hindu nationalism in Delhi.

At the festival, as people take selfies in front of an “I love Urdu” cutout, Shweta, a 20-year-old college student, says she believes shayari could unite people.

If you are feeling oppressed by the government, you need a medium

I literally love you all,every single of you who stood up against hate & bigotry. It was never my movement,I asked nobody to change name,Not one . But this is an befitting answer to hate. I want to apologise to all Muslims ,I am sorry we didn’t do better but we will #MyNameInUrdu

Continue reading...

Samuel Beckett rejected as unsuitable for the Nobel prize in 1968

Newly released papers show the committee chairman’s doubts in 1968 whether a prize for the Irish author would be in the spirit of the award

Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature in 1969, but newly released archives reveal that just a year earlier, the secretive committee that selects the winners had raised serious concerns about whether his writing was consistent with the spirit of the award.

In the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, the honour goes to an author who has written “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. The winner is decided each year by the members of the Swedish Academy, with their deliberations kept secret for 50 years. Just-released documents from 1968 show the committee’s chairman, Anders Österling, writing that “regarding Samuel Beckett, unfortunately, I have to maintain my basic doubts as to whether a prize to him is consistent with the spirit of Nobel’s will”.

Related: The ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize

Continue reading...

‘It has made me want to live’: public support for lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall over banned book revealed

The Well of Loneliness was censored after a campaign by the Sunday Express, but archives show thousands of readers wrote to express thanks for the book

Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was subjected to a vicious campaign of attack led by the Sunday Express for its depiction of lesbian relationships, eventually being suppressed and censored in the UK as a piece of “obscene libel”. But the author’s own papers, which are set to be digitised, reveal the outpouring of support Hall received from members of the public around the world, who wrote to thank her for creating, in her heroine Stephen Gordon, a character with whom they could identify.

Seen today as a seminal work of gay literature, The Well of Loneliness tells of the “invert” Stephen Gordon, who realises from a young age that she is attracted to women, dresses in masculine clothes, and falls in love. Hall, a lesbian herself, wrote it to “put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world”. At its raciest, it goes no further than “she kissed her full on the lips, as a lover”, with a night of passion described as “that night they were not divided”. It ends with Stephen’s plea: “Give us also the right to our existence!”

Some day we will wake up, and demand to know ourselves as we profess to know about everything else

Continue reading...

Lin-Manuel Miranda buys bookshop to save it from closure

Hamilton creator has bought New York’s century-old Drama Book Shop with two collaborators from his hit musical, after soaring rents looked set to close it

Years after writing his breakout musical In the Heights in the basement of New York’s Drama Book Shop, Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda has saved it from closing by buying the shop.

The actor and lyricist has teamed up with two of his colleagues from his hit musical Hamilton to purchase the Drama Book Shop, a 100-year-old script, sheet music and theatre-related bookseller currently located in Midtown Manhattan.

Continue reading...

Quasimodo's comeback: Victor Hugo musical returns for second stab at UK

It is a stage sensation in France – not to mention Kazakhstan and Korea – but Notre Dame de Paris was panned by critics when it first hit London. Now it’s back, in the original French

Early on in Victor Hugo’s tragic novel Notre Dame de Paris, the poet Gringoire proudly presents his latest play to the public and finds it rudely rejected. In a case of life imitating art, a French musical version of Hugo’s epic – which remains better known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame – opened in London in 2000 to some of that year’s harshest reviews. The show’s brutal critical reception rested chiefly on its clunky English lyrics (translated from the French) and the use of a prerecorded backing track instead of a live orchestra. The lyricist Luc Plamondon also complained of xenophobia among the hostile reviews.

Yet the production ran for over a year in the West End’s enormous Dominion theatre, with Tina Arena and Dannii Minogue both having stints as Esmeralda. It has been a smash hit elsewhere in Europe, as well as in South Korea and Kazakhstan. Now, as part of its 20th-anniversary tour, the show is returning to London for another run, this time performed in the original French at the Coliseum, with new English surtitles, in a translation by Jeremy Sams that aims to capture the richness of Plamondon’s lyrics. This time, there will also be a live string accompaniment played alongside the prerecorded score. The show will hope to enjoy a boost from the BBC’s popular new TV adaptation of Hugo’s Les Misérables, starring Dominic West, as well as the ongoing success of Les Mis, the longest-running musical in the West End.

Notre Dame de Paris is at the Coliseum, London, 23-27 January.

Continue reading...

Crashing author earnings 'threaten future of American literature'

Authors Guild survey finds writers’ incomes have fallen dramatically in five years – with literary novelists worst-hit

A major survey of American authors has uncovered a crash in author earnings described as “a crisis of epic proportions” – particularly for full-time literary writers, who are “on the verge of extinction”.

Surveying its membership and that of 14 other writers’ organisations in what it said was the largest survey of US authors’ earnings ever conducted, the Authors Guild reported that the median income from writing-related work fell to a historic low in 2017 at $6,080 (£4,760), down 42% from 2009.

Continue reading...

'Prisoner of my tastes': French author defends remarks about women over 50

Yann Moix says he feels no need to apologise for telling interviewer he was ‘incapable’ of loving women in their 50s

The French author and television presenter who claimed he could not love any woman over the age of 50 has said he has no regrets over his remarks that caused widespread outrage.

Yann Moix, 50, who is promoting his latest book, Rompre, said his personal preferences in women were his own business and he was only being honest.

Related: French author, 50, says women over 50 are too old to love

Continue reading...

Costa first novel award winner recalls 'awful' time writing his book

Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle wins £5,000 honour, alongside Sally Rooney who is the youngest author ever to win best novel

His debut The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle might be being praised as an “ingenious, intriguing and highly original mindbender of a murder mystery” by judges after it landed the Costa first novel award, but author Stuart Turton says that the process of writing it was “just awful”.

On Monday night, Turton was announced as the winner of the £5,000 award for his genre-bending debut, in which Evelyn is murdered hundreds of times at a party thrown by her parents. The only way to break the cycle is for Aidan – who wakes each morning, Groundhog Day-style, in the body of a different guest – to identify her killer.

Related: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton review – Quantum Leap meets Agatha Christie

Continue reading...

French author says women over 50 are too old to love

Yann Moix, who is 50 himself, says women of same age are ‘invisible’ to him

A popular French author and television presenter has caused outrage after claiming he was “incapable” of loving a woman aged over 50.

Yann Moix, 50, told a glossy magazine: “Come on now, let’s not exaggerate! That’s not possible … too, too old.”

Continue reading...

John Burningham, children's author and illustrator, dies aged 82

Burningham, who was married to fellow children’s writer Helen Oxenbury, created beloved picture books including Mr Gumpy’s Outing and Avocado Baby

John Burningham, the children’s author and illustrator behind some of the 20th century’s most enduring children’s books, has died at the age of 82.

The writer and artist died on Friday after contracting pneumonia, his literary agent confirmed on Monday.

Continue reading...

Independent bookshops grow for second year after 20-year decline

After a tiny increase in 2017, figures show their ranks swelled by 15 stores last year in the face of ‘an increasingly challenging landscape’

• What are your favourite independent bookshops and why?
  

The litany of bookshops that have disappeared from the UK’s high streets over the last two decades is long and sobering: chains such as Ottakars, Books etc, Dillons and Borders, and more than 1,000 independents. But over the past two years, indies have been quietly flourishing, with official figures from the Booksellers Association revealing a growth in numbers for the second year in a row.

Before 2017, the number in the UK and Ireland had declined every year since 1995, when there were 1,894 independent bookshops. A low of just 867 shops was reached in 2016, but 2017 marked a tiny turnaround: then, the total number in the UK and Ireland increased by just one, to reach 868. At the time, the BA predicted that booksellers’ fortunes were reversing. Now, its latest membership numbers confirm it: in 2018, the number of independents rose by 15 to 883. New stores range from Category Is Books in Glasgow – the second LGBTQ-dedicated bookshop in the UK – to the gloriously named Stripey Badger Bookshop in the Yorkshire Dales, and Lost in Books in Cornwall.

Related: A good bookshop is not just about the books – at last we realise that | Sian Cain

Continue reading...

Tinker, tailor, Marxist academic… how Le Carré angered Eric Hobsbawm

Marxist intellectual asked author why MI5 man in A Perfect Spy had a name so like his own, new biography reveals

Their names stand high among the roll call of British men of letters of the modern age: both revered authors with an international following, but publishing in very different corners of the literary world. One, John le Carré, is the creator of a succession of brilliant spy thrillers, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Little Drummer Girl, the other, the late Eric Hobsbawm, was a leading exponent of leftwing historical thought, a man who was also the subject of state surveillance for many years.

Now the first biography of Hobsbawm, A Life in History, due out early next month, is to reveal an unlikely correspondence between the two men that centred on the name of a character in one Le Carré novel. In the 1986 book A Perfect Spy, later made into a BBC television series, Le Carré makes reference to a character called “Hobsbawn” who was under the control of the British security services. The real man, Professor Hobsbawm, was not pleased.

Related: After The Night Manager: five of the best Le Carré novels

Continue reading...

'Vanquished white male': Houellebecq's new novel eerily predicts French discontent

Literature’s enfant terrible awarded Légion d’honneur as ‘scathing and visionary’ Serotonin released, which foresees gilets jaunes protests

He is idolised as France’s biggest literary export, a controversial poet-provocateur who holds up a mirror to the grim truths of contemporary France.

So when Michel Houellebecq’s long-awaited new novel, Serotonin, hit French bookstores on Friday morning with a massive print run of 320,000 copies, simultaneous translations in several countries and the author for the first time staying silent and refusing any interviews or media promotion, it was proclaimed a national event.

Related: Unreconciled by Michel Houellebecq review – perfectly suited to the age of Trump

Related: Michel Houellebecq: ‘Am I Islamophobic? Probably, yes'

Related: Michel Houellebecq: profane or prophetic? – books podcast

Continue reading...

Feminist Library saved from closure as supporters raise £35,000

Redevelopment plans had threatened its future, but donations mean the volunteer-run archive in London can afford to move to new premises

Hundreds of supporters have come together to raise thousands of pounds to save London’s Feminist Library from closure, and help move the collection to new premises.

Founded in 1975 during the second wave of the women’s liberation movement, the archive brings together an extensive collection of feminist literature and “herstories” and is one of only three such facilities in the UK. In 2016 the library, which is a volunteer-run charity, was threatened with eviction from the building in Southwark where it has been housed for three decades, when the council announced it would begin charging rent – increasing its costs from a £12,000 annual service charge to £30,000 a year.

Continue reading...

'Leading the entertainment pack': UK print book sales rise again

Bestsellers including Michelle Obama’s Becoming cited as reasons for success, with industry voices praising sector for fourth consecutive year of growth

Former first lady Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, which sold more than half a million copies in less than two months, has helped the UK book market to a fourth consecutive year of growth.

Statistics from UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan show that the print book market in the UK grew 2.1% in value and 0.3% in volume in 2018. In total, 190.9m books were sold last year, for £1.63bn. The Bookseller magazine said this was up £34m on 2017. Volume also increased, although more marginally, with an extra 627,000 books sold last year.

Continue reading...

'The drought is over': mass expiration of US copyright sees books, film and art enter public domain

Legislation in 1998 extended copyright by 20 years, so this year marks the first time in two decades that the pool of freely available work has been added to

Robert Frost’s haunting little poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, entered the public domain in the US on 1 January alongside thousands of works, by authors from Agatha Christie to Virginia Woolf, in an unprecedented expiration of copyrights. Unprecedented because it has been 21 years since the last major expiration in the US: the passing of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act added a further 20 years to existing copyrights, meaning that the swathe of 1922 works which passed into the public domain in 1998, after a 75-year copyright term, are only now being followed by works first published in the US in 1923.

“The drought is over,” proclaims Duke Law School’s Center for the Public Domain, highlighting some of the works which are now available royalty-free, by authors from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kahlil Gibran, PG Wodehouse to DH Lawrence, Edith Wharton to ee cummings. It’s not only books: copyright in the US is also expiring on a host of films, paintings and music.

Continue reading...

Tentacle by Rita Indiana review – a post-apocalyptic odyssey

From race and gender to queer politics and ecological disaster: huge themes are tackled in a slender Dominican dystopia that spans three time frames with dizzying results

Don’t be deceived by the slender proportions of this novel from the Dominican musician and author Rita Indiana. Tentacle shapeshifts dizzyingly around three time spans and a loosely connected group of characters, and takes on huge themes, including race and gender, the impact of tourism, apocalyptic events and ecological disaster.

Set in the future, the opening section features a maid called Acilde Figueroa, working for an elderly voodoo priestess with links to the tyrannical president. Acilde is saving up for Rainbow Brite, a one-injection gender reassignment operation; boyish and slender, she has been masquerading as an underage rent boy, until Eric, one of her tricks, comes up with a plan to fast-track her masculinity project. The seas around the island are a lifeless soup due to a nuclear catastrophe directly attributable to the president, and Eric has learned through his contact with the spirit world that he must nurture the Chosen One on behalf of the primordial sea-god Olokun. It will be their job to travel back into the past and persuade the president not to commit his act of nuclear folly.

A dry, sardonic tone anchors the pulpy narrative, with its bloody violence, brutish sex and futuristic flourishes

Continue reading...

via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2R4ofAz

Edoardo Ballerini: narrator of 133-hour audiobook on his 'evolving art'

Actor who has recorded more than 250 titles says audiobooks are an art form in their own right

The increasing popularity of audiobooks has raised recorded narration to the level of a new art form, according to the man whose 133-hour version of an epic autobiographical novel has sealed his status as one of its foremost practitioners.

The Italian-American actor Edoardo Ballerini has recorded more than 250 titles in an audiobook boom that has seen sales double in five years. Like many in the audiobook world, he believes this commercial success has coincided with a creative flourishing.

Related: Dream job: the writer paid to send millions to sleep

Had the thought this was a “bad” year because I missed out on two film projects I wanted. Then realized I completed the greatest, most difficult, project of my career, narrating 3,600 pages of #KarlOveKnausgaard. Decided it was a great year. #perspective #gratitude pic.twitter.com/B9PnE8JIK8

Continue reading...