Hemingway centre opens in Havana to preserve writer's work

Cultural project in cooperation with US showcases artefacts from writer’s stay on island

A restoration centre to preserve the work of Ernest Hemingway has opened in Cuba, highlighting an area of cooperation with the US even as bilateral relations between the old cold war foes have chilled again.

Hemingway, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1954, wrote some of his best-known works during the 21 years he lived at Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, now a museum in San Francisco de Paula on the outskirts of Havana.

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Book prize names two winners as it criticises 'false hierarchy' of awards

Republic of Consciousness prize honours Will Eaves and Alex Pheby, but says awards make us wrongly consider a sole winner ‘the best’

A novel about James Joyce’s troubled daughter, Lucia, and a reimagining of the chemical castration of Alan Turing have been named the joint winners of the Republic of Consciousness prize, which celebrates the best work by small publishers.

Murmur by Will Eaves (CB Editions), inspired by Turing’s punishment for gross indecency, tied with Lucia by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar Press) for the Republic of Consciousness award on Thursday night. Both titles win £3,500, split between the press, which is awarded £2,500, and the author, who receives £1,000.

Related: 'We need small presses': author launches new award to support fiction from small publishers

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Deaf poet Raymond Antrobus wins Ted Hughes prize

British Jamaican’s debut collection challenges Hughes’s description of deaf children

After fiercely challenging Ted Hughes’s description of deaf children as “alert and simple” in a poem in his first collection, the deaf spoken-word poet Raymond Antrobus has won the Ted Hughes award for poetry.

The 33-year-old British Jamaican, who has performed at Glastonbury and also works as a teacher, has received the £5,000 prize for his debut The Perseverance. Described as “compelling” in the Guardian, the collection touches on family life, particularly the death of Antrobus’s father, his diagnosis with deafness as a small child, and his biracial heritage. It has also been longlisted for this year’s Folio prize.

Related: Generation next: the rise – and rise – of the new poets

Biography

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Slimming cookbook becomes fastest selling non-fiction book since records began

Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone sold 210,000 copies in three days, toppling Jamie Oliver and Peter Kay

From cheesecake-stuffed strawberries to diet cola chicken, a collection of slimming recipes which started life as a food blog has toppled political tomes and celebrity memoirs to become the fastest selling non-fiction book since records began, racking up more than 200,000 sales in three days.

Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone went on sale on 21 March and 72 hours later it had sold 210,506 copies, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan – the highest single week sale for a non-fiction book since Nielsen began to track sales in 2001.

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Jordan Peterson book returns to New Zealand bookshops after Christchurch attack

Whitcoulls reportedly removed the book from sale ‘in light of some extremely disturbing material being circulated’

Controversial academic Jordan Peterson has publicised the reinstatement of his self-help book 12 Rules for Life at New Zealand book chain Whitcoulls, after it was removed from sale following the Christchurch attacks.

Last week, images of an email from Whitcoulls were posted on social media in which a spokeswoman for the bookseller told a customer that it had taken the decision to remove Peterson’s book from sale “in light of some extremely disturbing material being circulated prior, during and after the Christchurch attacks”.

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'Screw the snobbish literati': was Kurt Vonnegut a science-fiction writer?

In a new essay, comedian Richard Herring claims Vonnegut was the victim of snobbery. But does anyone still believe sci-fi is a lesser genre?

“Screw the snobbish literati,” writes Richard Herring in my anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. “There is a deal of literary snobbishness when it comes to Kurt Vonnegut.”

My first thought was that Herring was talking out of the part of the body Vonnegut liked to illustrate with a star. Where was this snobbery? Vonnegut isn’t universally acclaimed, but I’ve trawled through archives of reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five and seen nothing but praise. His New York Times obituary in 2007 declared him the “novelist who caught the imagination of his age”. Norman Mailer called Vonnegut “our own Mark Twain”, a comparison many have made, and praised him as “a marvellous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own”. When Vonnegut died, Gore Vidal said: “Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull.”

Related: Reading group: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is our book for March

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Michelle Obama's memoir sells more than 10m copies

Former first lady’s Becoming is a global hit in 31 languages and has sold 600,000 in the UK

Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming is on track to become the most successful memoir in modern publishing history, selling more than 10m copies to date, as life after the White House continues to prove commercial gold for brand Obama.

Thomas Rabe, chief executive of German media group Bertelsmann, the parent company of Becoming’s publisher, Penguin Random House, said the title was the book giant’s biggest success of the last year. “We believe that these memoirs could well become the most successful memoir ever,” he said.

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Waterstones says it can't pay living wage, as 1,000 authors support staff appeal

Managing director says book chain ‘simply not profitable enough’, as Sally Rooney, Val McDermid and other authors write to protest

Almost 1,000 writers including Kerry Hudson, David Nicholls, Sally Rooney, Michael Rosen and Val McDermid have backed a campaign for Waterstones booksellers to be paid the living wage.

The support follows a petition from staff at Waterstones, signed by more than 6,000 people, which calls on the book chain’s managing director, James Daunt, to pay booksellers a starting living wage of £9 an hour, or £10.55 for the Greater London area. “Working for a rate of pay that is below the living wage results in booksellers who are stressed, preoccupied and who have little spare time and energy to devote to buying books, reading them, and keeping up with news and trends in the industry – all of which activities are undertaken outside contracted hours, and which many staff consider to be (and are encouraged to view as) integral to their role,” says the petition.

Related: Balancing the books: how Waterstones came back from the dead

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Larry Cohen, cult exploitation director, dies aged 77

The director of the It’s Alive and Maniac Cop franchises also wrote scripts for TV and the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth

Larry Cohen, director of fondly remembered cult thrillers such as Black Caesar, It’s Alive and Q: The Winged Serpent, has died aged 77, it has been reported. Cohen was a key figure in exploitation movie circles in the 70s and 80s, as well as writing scripts and storylines for TV shows such as The Fugitive and Columbo, before staging a feature film comeback with the script for the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth in 2002.

The Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro praised him as “a true iconoclast and independent”, while Baby Driver director Edgar Wright wrote on social media: “For so many fun high-concept genre romps with ideas bigger than the budgets, for so many truly inspiring cult movies, I thank you Larry.”

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British Library planning Leeds branch with Boston Spa upgrade

Documents obtained by Guardian show ‘ambitious’ plans for British Library North

The British Library has embarked upon “ambitious” plans to open a branch in Leeds as part of a drive to expand the organisation’s activities in the north of England.

Board meeting minutes obtained by the Guardian reveal the library has been in discussions with Leeds city council about potential locations for a facility referred to as British Library North.

Related: Limits of digitisation at the British Library | Letter

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Gloucester church with literary links reopens after £2.1m restoration

Banker James Wood, buried in the church, may have inspired Charles Dickens’s Scrooge

A Gloucester city centre church and schoolroom with links to Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson have been given a new lease of life by a £2.1m restoration project.

The St Mary de Crypt church and Old Crypt schoolroom had fallen into disrepair and disuse. A two-year restoration project has finished and the buildings have reopened as a place of worship as well as a creative and community centre, heritage attraction and events venue.

Related: Lost portrait of Charles Dickens to be displayed at writer's former home

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Gripping refugee tale wins Waterstones children's book prize

Anti-trafficking campaigner Onjali Q Raúf was inspired to write adventure story The Boy at the Back of the Class by a Syrian mother and baby she encountered in a Calais camp

Onjali Q Raúf has won the Waterstones children’s book prize with her debut novel, which she wrote while recovering from life-saving surgery.

Raúf is founder of the charity Making Herstory, which fights the trafficking and enslavement of women. After botched surgery for endometriosis left her vomiting and in crippling pain, she was told she had only three weeks to live. Further major surgery saved her life, but forced Raúf to spend three months recovering in bed.

It's extra surreal … I'm seeing people who are distraught, trafficked, dealing with emergencies … and then in this other world you've got champagne and cupcakes

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Roy of the Rovers, Gus Gorilla and co return in comic specials

2000AD publisher Rebellion bringing back Sweeny Toddler, Gums and more in new series

Some of Britain’s favourite comic characters are being resurrected in a new series of specials.

The anarchic adventures of the likes of Sweeny Toddler, the baddest baby in town, Gums, the world’s most incompetent shark, and Gus Gorilla are being brought back by Rebellion Publishing, which puts out the long-running weekly science fiction comic 2000AD, featuring Judge Dredd.

Related: 'Mini-Disney': Judge Dredd publisher to open UK film and TV studios

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Actor playing gay role in musical sacked for homophobic comments

Oluwaseyi Omooba had been due to play star role in The Color Purple in UK stage show

An actor playing a gay character in a stage production of the Color Purple has been sacked over homophobic comments she made five years ago.

Oluwaseyi Omooba, who was due to play the lead role of Celie, claimed the Bible made clear homosexuality was wrong in the eyes of God and that people cannot be born gay. A row was sparked when her Facebook post was unearthed and shared online by a fellow actor last week.

Related: Being a gay Christian can be hurtful and gruelling. But I refuse to lose faith | Lucy Knight

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Philip Pullman wins JM Barrie lifetime achievement award

Author of His Dark Materials acclaimed as ‘a magical spinner of yarns’ who appeals to all ages – especially children

Philip Pullman has won the JM Barrie award, a prize to mark a “lifetime’s achievement in delighting children”.

The annual award is given by the charity Action for Children’s Arts, which campaigns for all children to have access to the arts, and celebrates work that will stand the test of time. ACA chair Vicky Ireland said Pullman was chosen by the charity’s trustees for his outstanding talent as a storyteller who appeals to all ages, especially to the young.

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Oxford English Dictionary adds new entries: chuddies, jibbons and fantoosh

An Indian English word for underpants joins a host of Scottish insults after the dictionary crowdsourced regional terms

English speakers from around the world have flocked to help the Oxford English Dictionary expand its coverage of regional vocabulary, with a new update including suggestions such as jibbons, chuddies and sitooterie.

The dictionary launched its Words Where You Are appeal to the public last year to mark the 90th anniversary of the completion of its first edition. The regional vocabulary suggestions which have poured in from readers ever since span the globe, from the Welsh English term for spring onions, “jibbons”, to the name for the regional dialect heard in New Orleans, “Yat”, which is derived from the greeting: “Where y’at?”

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The teenage dandy's tale: how a female biographer saw Chaucer afresh

The young Canterbury Tales author was paraded by his employer in scandalously tight outfits, says Oxford academic Marion Turner

He may be revered as the father of English literature, but Geoffrey Chaucer’s first appearance in recorded history is as a teenager wearing leggings so tight one churchman blamed the fashion for bringing back the plague.

Scholars have known since at least 1966 that Elizabeth de Burgh, who employed the adolescent Chaucer, bought him a “paltok” for four shillings at Easter 1357, spending a further three shillings for black and red hose, and a pair of shoes. But Chaucer’s first female biographer, the Oxford academic Marion Turner, suggests that no previous biographer had ever considered what a paltok might be. Delving into contemporary chronicles, she found commentators at the time describing paltoks – a kind of tunic – as “extremely short garments ... which failed to conceal their arses or their private parts”.

For Elizabeth de Burgh, it's part of her prestige to have beautifully dressed young men hanging around. They're like her display objects in the living room

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Egyptian dissident writer Alaa al-Aswany sued by military prosecutors

Bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building says case against him violates Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Alaa al-Aswany, the bestselling Egyptian author of The Yacoubian Building, has been sued by military prosecutors in Egypt for “insulting the president, the armed forces and judicial institutions”.

According to his French publisher, Actes Sud, the accusations relate to the columns Aswany has published in Deutsche Welle Arabic, and to his latest novel The Republic, As If, which recounts the events of the 2011 revolution in Egypt. On his Facebook page, Aswany said the case against him was “a clear violation of article 65 of the Egyptian constitution[pdf], which states, ‘Freedom of thought and opinion is guaranteed. All individuals have the right to express their opinion through speech, writing, imagery, or any other means of expression and publication’,” and that it was also “a violation of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Egypt is a signatory”.

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Francis Spufford pens unauthorised Narnia novel

The Stone Table hailed as a ‘seamless recreation’ of CS Lewis’s style, but this addition to the acclaimed series of children’s books may never be published

Francis Spufford has taken a break from writing award-winning adult literature to fill in the details of what exactly went on in Narnia before The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. But he isn’t expecting his novel, set in CS Lewis’s magical world, to be published any time soon.

Spufford, who has been writing for the past three and a half years without the permission of the Lewis estate, began Narnia story The Stone Table on a family holiday to entertain his daughter Theodora. After he had published books including a novel of 18th-century Manhattan, a personal exploration of Christianity and a study of the USSR melding fact and fiction, his daughter “had been lobbying for me to write a book she would enjoy for some time”, he said. But the novel was also a “present for my younger self, though sadly I have no Tardis to deliver it to him”.

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Carnegie medal shortlist celebrates novels in free verse

Three of the eight shortlisted novels for the UK’s most prestigious children’s book award are coming-of-age stories in verse

Almost half of the novels shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious children’s book award, the Carnegie medal, are written in free verse.

Founded in memory of the Scottish-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who set up more than 2,800 libraries around the world, the CILIP Carnegie medal has been awarded to CS Lewis, Mary Norton, Philip Pullman and Arthur Ransome. This year, for the first time in the prize’s history, three of the eight novels in the running are written in verse: Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, Kwame Alexander’s Rebound and Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down.

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Wellcome prize shortlist celebrates books about masculinity and mental illness

A transgender boxer’s memoir and Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation are among the six titles vying for the £30,000 prize

From a memoir by the first transgender man to box at Madison Square Garden to a novel inspired by the life of Alan Turing, the exploration of gender is a key theme on the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome book prize.

The £30,000 award is open to fiction and non-fiction, and aims to celebrate a book that best illuminates “the many ways that health, medicine and illness touch our lives”. The six books shortlisted this year include transgender boxer Thomas Page McBee’s memoir Amateur, an exploration of gender and masculinity that judges said “challenges and confounds some of our most ingrained prejudices”, and Will Eaves’s novel Murmur, which fictionalises the period of Alan Turing’s life when the mathematician was undergoing chemical castration, before he killed himself. The chair of judges, novelist Elif Shafak, said it would “grip your mind in the very first pages, break your heart halfway through, and in the end, strangely, unexpectedly, restore your faith in human beings and their endless capacity for resilience”.

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Anna Burns and Sally Rooney on Rathbones Folio prize longlist

Booker winner Milkman and Normal People, which took the Costa novel award, among 20 contenders for the £30,000 prize

The 2019 Rathbones Folio prize longlist spans the world, from a Booker-winning novel set amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland to a life of St Francis of Assisi told in verse.

Related: Normal People: how Sally Rooney’s novel became the literary phenomenon of the decade

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That's my cement mixer! Mike Nelson on turning the Tate into 'Fire sale Britain'

From engines to filing cabinets to tractor parts, the artist scoured asset-stripping websites for the things British companies toss out as they close or move away. The results ring with power

Mike Nelson is feeling his age. He’s halfway through installing his new work, in the soaring Duveen galleries of Tate Britain, and as we sit down to chat, I notice the supports strapped to his arm. The artist gives me a quick run-through of all the dislocations, injuries and strains that decades of vigorous construction work, all in the name of art, have exacted on his arms and shoulders. “I’m starting to feel long in the tooth,” he mutters apologetically.

It all feels apt, given the work he’s installing. Redundancy, decrepitude and physical labour are central themes of The Asset Strippers. In preparation, over the last six months, he has amassed an array of industrial equipment from British manufacturers downsizing, closing or moving out of the country. Shelved, archived, stacked, clustered and sitting on reinforced flooring, this collection of machines large and small recasts Tate Britain as a storage facility for the detritus of British industry.

Related: A modern masterpiece: Mike Nelson's The Coral Reef | Jonathan Jones

In the 20th century, sculptures started to look like machines – and the machines started to look like sculptures

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Male and female writers’ media coverage reveals ‘marked bias’

The Emilia Report, named for England’s first published female poet, analysed the fortunes of writers of opposite sexes in the same market areas

Emilia Bassano became England’s first published female poet in 1610 and – according to some – could be the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But Bassano has largely been forgotten by posterity, with her reputation eclipsed by male contemporaries. Four hundred years later, research commissioned by the producers of Emilia, a play about Bassano’s struggle for recognition as an artist, has found that women writers continue to be judged by the “pram in the hallway”, and pigeonholed as domestic rather than taken seriously as authors.

The Emilia Report compared broadsheet coverage of 10 male and female writers in the same market. It found a “marked bias” towards male writers, who received 56% of review coverage. Looking at comparable authors Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris, who had both written new works of fantasy – Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and Harris’s A Pocket Full of Crows – researchers found that while Gaiman’s received widespread coverage, Harris’s did not receive any coverage at all. A similar story emerged for commercial fiction authors Matt Haig and Rowan Coleman; his How to Stop Time was mentioned 12 times by newspapers, in a mix of reviews, interviews and news, while her The Summer of Impossible Things got just three mentions.

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Marlon James: ‘I underwent gay exorcism in Pentecostal church in Jamaica’

Man Booker prize winner tells of how religion intensified his struggle with his sexuality as a youth

Jamaican novelist Marlon James, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2015, wanted to alter his sexuality “more than anything” in his youth and underwent a gruelling religious ritual to try to “drive out the gay”, he is to explain in a radio interview on Sunday.

But it was only when the writer eventually turned away from formal religion and left the Caribbean that he was able to fully accept his homosexuality and even write about it. As Desert Island Discs’ latest castaway on BBC Radio 4, James details the extreme evangelical exorcism, or “gay cure”, he endured at a Pentecostal church in Jamaica.

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True crime grips London book fair 2019

Big deals signed for study of a 19th-century family of killers, Hell’s Half-Acre, and Murder Isn’t Easy, a mortician’s take on Agatha Christie’s forensics

The spectre of true crime was stalking the aisles at this year’s London book fair, with publishers snapping up investigations into past evils in the wake of successes in podcasting and television such as Dirty John, Serial and The Teacher’s Pet.

Offers were flying in for former Waterstones bookseller Susan Jonusas’s first book Hell’s Half-Acre, a study of the the Bender family of serial killers in Kansas in 1873. Jonusas, 24, left Waterstones in December to write full-time. “Buried on a homestead seven miles south of the town were 11 bodies in varying states of decay. Further investigation revealed a well containing remains of even more victims. The number of people murdered was estimated at 20,” said Jonusas’s literary agency. “The idea that a family of seemingly respectable homesteaders were capable of operating ‘a human slaughter pen’ appalled and fascinated the nation. But who the Benders really were, why they committed such a vicious killing spree and what became of them when they fled from the law is a mystery that has remained unsolved to this day.” UK rights are still being finalised, with Viking snapping it up for a six-figure deal in the US. Agent Georgina Capel, who was fielding offers for the book, said: “I suspect the true-crime podcast thing is driving the current interest.”

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Trump era proves a boom time for political publishing

A spate of books focused on the Trump administration and related subjects are proving a moneymaker for publishers

After two years in office Donald Trump has finally taught book publishers what cable news and the newsprint industry already knew: political journalism is great business and such a huge moneymaker that it may be eating into other publishing genres.

More than a dozen books about Trump’s Washington are due, many from well-known writers paid advances in the region of a million dollars. Subsets include five about or involving the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh and, last week in the US, Kushner, Inc., a study of Jared and Ivanka Kushner by the Anglo-US writer Vicky Ward.

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WS Merwin, Pulitzer-winning former US poet laureate, dies at 91

Writer who protested against environmental destruction and the Vietnam war died at home in Hawaii

WS Merwin, a prolific and versatile poetry master who evolved through a wide range of styles as he celebrated nature, condemned war and industrialism and reached for the elusive past, died Friday. He was 91.

A Pulitzer prize winner and former US poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books, from early works inspired by myths and legends to fiery protests against environmental destruction and the conflict in Vietnam to late meditations on age and time.

Related: Poem of the week: After the Dragonflies by WS Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you

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What will you be reading next year? London book fair's star attractions

Salman Rushdie’s take on Don Quixote, Elton John’s memoirs and a study of criminals in Broadmoor – a selection of the biggest and most interesting books announced at the fair

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (August 2019)
Inspired by Don Quixote, this novel following the adventures of an ageing travelling salesman who falls in love with a TV star and travels across America to prove himself worthy of her hand.

Postscript by Cecelia Ahern (Autumn 2019)
A sequel to Ahern’s bestselling tearjerker PS I Love You, which revisits the widow Holly, seven years after her husband’s death.

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The best recent science fiction and fantasy – review roundup

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie; The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson; The Migration by Helen Marshall; The Autist by Stephen Palmer and Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

Ann Leckie’s first four novels were award-winning space operas, which brought something refreshingly different to the genre with her examination of gender, politics and power – not to mention narrative technique. Her debut fantasy novel, The Raven Tower (Orbit, £16.99), is similarly groundbreaking. It may seem familiar, with its dispossessed lords, vengeful gods and soldier heroes, but Leckie’s central character is a transgender warrior, and the complex narrative is told partly in the second person. The warrior is Eolo, a loyal servant of Mawat, heir to the throne of Iraden. On returning from battle, the pair discover that Mawat’s father has vanished and his uncle has usurped the throne. It falls on Eolo to investigate the disappearance. A god in the form of a rock called Strength and Patience of the Hill recounts the fraught history of the Iraden kingdom as Leckie again examines the role of power in society – this time, that of manipulative gods – and spins a gripping tale of intrigue and politics.

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Amazon pulls books offering dangerous 'cures' for autism

Following reports of dangerous therapies being promoted in titles being sold through the site, a number have been quietly withdrawn

Books that promise cures for autism through potentially dangerous therapies have been quietly removed from Amazon over the last week.

The removals followed an exposé in Wired magazine this week that highlighted how Amazon was selling dozens of titles claiming to be able to cure the lifelong condition with nostrums from camel milk to yoga and veganism.

Related: The man who encourages the sick and dying to drink industrial bleach | Martin Robbins

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'It was like a miracle': Eight writers surprised with $165,000 awards

Winners of Windham-Campbell prizes, intended to free authors from money worries, only learn they were in contention after they have won

The Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin was on a trip with her family to mark her 50th birthday when the phone rang and she discovered she’d won one of this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, announced on Wednesday evening. The $165,000 (£125,000) award came at a good time, McLaughlin revealed.

“It was like a miracle,” she said, “arriving at a time when I was experiencing a bit of a wobble, psychologically, in my writing life. In a sense, it was like an answer to a question I had started asking myself.”

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Harper Lee letter condemns home town for making her into a 'tourist attraction'

Auctioned letter to old friend fulminates against the ‘indescribable’ way To Kill a Mockingbird was being used to promote Monroeville, Alabama

A letter from Harper Lee to an old friend in which the To Kill a Mockingbird author rages about the “bad taste” and hypocrisy of people in her home town she felt were “trying to turn [her] into a tourist attraction like Graceland or Elvis” has sold at auction for almost £20,000.

The letter is part of an archive of drawings and letters from Lee to Charles Weldon Carruth. Written in 1993 from Monroeville, Alabama, it sees her complain that “what was once a tiny town of considerable character is now six times its size and populated by appalling people”.

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Stormzy launches search for 'best writer of a new generation'

Rapper develops his #Merky Books publishing imprint with the New writers’ prize for unpublished authors under 30

Less than a year after taking his first step into publishing with the launch of #Merky Books, the grime artist Stormzy has unveiled the New writers’ prize for authors under 30, to “promote the stories that aren’t being heard, and to find the best writer of a new generation”.

#Merky Books, a Penguin Random House imprint focused on fostering talent among young UK writers, is part of the musician’s growing #Merky empire, which also includes a record label and music festival. Its first book was Stormzy’s memoir, Rise Up, co-authored with the 25-year-old writer Jude Yawson.

Related: From Lena Dunham to Stormzy: the world of the celebrity book imprint

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Andrew Ridgeley to publish Wham! memoir

Wham! George & Me follows Ridgeley and the late George Michael from childhood to their final concert in 1986

Andrew Ridgeley is to publish a memoir about his experiences as half of 80s pop titans Wham! alongside the late George Michael. Wham! George & Me will follow the pair from their childhood friendship to their final concert in 1986.

“They made and broke iconic records, they were treated like gods, but they stayed true to their friendship and ultimately to themselves,” said publisher Penguin in a statement. “Andrew’s memoir covers in wonderful detail those years, up until that last iconic concert: the scrapes, the laughs, the relationships, the good and the bad.”

Related: Talented and unique: George Michael took a singular path to stardom

Related: Still saving us from tears: the inside story of Wham!'s Last Christmas

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Man Booker International prize 2019 longlist sees small publishers win big

Judges praise the 13 finalists – all but two published by indie houses – for ‘enriching our idea of what fiction can do’

The “finest works of translation from around the world” are almost exclusively published by independent presses – at least according to the Man Booker International prize, which has unveiled a longlist of 13 books with only two showings from major publishing houses.

The prize is worth £50,000 to its winners, split equally between author and translator. This year’s longlist ranges from Chinese author Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, set in a world of constant surveillance and translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, to Palestinian-Icelandic writer Mazen Maarouf’s Jokes for the Gunmen, a collection of stories set in a war zone told from the perspective of a child, translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright.

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Art critic John Richardson dies aged 95

The eminent British art historian died in his Manhattan home, with the fourth volume of his definitive Picasso biography as yet unpublished

Sir John Richardson, the eminent British art historian and critic whose multivolume series on Pablo Picasso drew upon his personal and aesthetic affinity for the Spanish artist, and was widely praised as a work of art in its own right, has died aged 95.

Nicholas Latimer, a vice president at publishers Alfred A Knopf, said Richardson died on Tuesday morning in his Manhattan home.

Related: John Richardson: a life in art

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'Stratospheric' political book sales almost double in two years

Exposés of the Trump White House have led the boom, but readers have also been turning to theoretical work from authors including Marx and Orwell

Whether it boils down to a desperation to understand the intricacies of Theresa May’s backstop or a longing for reason in these troubled times, sales of politics books have almost doubled over the last two years.

Data revealed at a London book fair conference on Monday showed that politics and government titles were the fastest-growing category in non-fiction, up by 170% in 2018, with 1.8m books sold. Driven by titles including Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which brought in sales worth almost £2.5m, and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s polemic Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, which sold more than 100,000 copies, sales of political books were worth £20.4m last year, according to Nielsen Book, up from £11.7m in 2016.

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Joni Mitchell book, hand-drawn for friends in 1971, to be published

Morning Glory on the Vine, which combines lyrics, poems and paintings by the revered singer-songwriter, was originally produced privately in 1971

A rare book of lyrics, poems and illustrations that Joni Mitchell created for her closest friends more than 40 years ago is to be commercially published for the first time this autumn.

The Canadian musician put together Morning Glory on the Vine in 1971, the year her album Blue topped charts around the world. Collecting lyrics, poems and more than 30 of her paintings, just 100 copies were hand-produced in Los Angeles for her friends. “Existing copies of this labour of love have rarely been seen in the past half-century,” according to the singer’s website.

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Stressed Brits buy record number of self-help books

Bookshop owners say political turmoil has sent customers in search of uplifting titles

Sales of self-help books have reached record levels in the past year, as stressed-out Britons turn to celebrities, psychologists and internet gurus for advice on how to cope with uncertain times.

Three million such books were sold – a rise of 20% – according to figures from Nielsen Book Research, propelling self-improvement or pop psychology into one of the fastest-growing genres of publishing.

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Swallows and Armenians: Arthur Ransome’s forgotten inspirations revealed

A new art project is exploring how the characters in the English children’s classic were modelled on a family from Aleppo

Arthur Ransome’s fictional Walker children – John, Susan, Titty and Roger – are quintessentially English, enjoying summers sailing in the Lake District with bread and marmalade for tea, and peppering their talk with regular “jolly good”s. But the Anglo-Armenian family who inspired the Walkers deserves to be more widely acknowledged, says artist Karen Babayan, who hopes to re-establish the connection through an Arts Council England-funded project spanning stories, dance, theatre and art.

The Altounyan children – Taqui, Susan, Mavis (known to her family as Titty), Roger and Brigit – lived in Aleppo, Syria. Their father, the half-Armenian, half-Irish Ernest Altounyan, had known Ransome since their school days at Rugby, and Ransome had unsuccessfully proposed to their mother, Dora Collingwood. Altounyan married Collingwood in 1915, and their friendship with Ransome was renewed when the Altounyan family took a summer trip to the Lake District in 1928. Ernest and Ransome bought two boats, named Swallow and Mavis, for the children and the group spent months sailing, fishing and walking together.

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First Uzbek novel translated into English lands €20,000 prize

Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance, ‘an Uzbek Game of Thrones’ initially published on Facebook, takes the EBRD literature prize

The first novel to be translated from Uzbek into English, an “Uzbek Game of Thrones” that is banned in the author’s home country and was initially published in Facebook posts, has won the €20,000 (£17,200) EBRD literature prize.

Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance intertwines the stories of two central Asian writers: the 19th-century Uzbek poet Oyxon, a slave who was forcibly married to three khans, and the author Abdulla Qodiriy, who was writing her story when he was imprisoned by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, in 1937.

Related: The Devils’ Dance by Hamid Ismailov review – a landmark Uzbek novel

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'A dream': out of print memoir shortlisted for 2019 Stella prize

Sydney writer Vicki Laveau-Harvie joins five others in the running for the $50,000 prize for Australian women’s writing

“It was like I suddenly had fairy godmothers.” That was how Sydney writer Vicki Laveau-Harvie felt when, in the space of a few days, her memoir went from being out of print to being longlisted for the Stella prize, represented by an agent, and picked up for reissue by a major publishing house.

Related: There’s no shame in reading whatever books you want – literary snobs be damned | Emily Maguire

Related: Stella prize 2019: Gail Jones, Bri Lee and Chloe Hooper make 'thrilling' longlist

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Atwood to launch The Handmaid’s Tale sequel with live broadcast

Exclusive: Author’s interview about The Testaments will be filmed at National Theatre in London

Margaret Atwood is to mark the publication of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale with a midnight launch in London on 9 September followed by a live interview at the National Theatre broadcast around the world.

There will also be a six-date tour of the UK and Ireland.

Related: Margaret Atwood announces The Handmaid's Tale sequel, The Testaments

Related: Margaret Atwood is right to have the last word on The Handmaid’s Tale | Stephanie Merritt

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Surprise as unknown Irish translation of Ibn Sīna discovered in spine of book

Manuscript of ancient physician’s Canon of Medicine had been used to bind a later book, and shows that medieval Ireland’s medicine was in step with the rest of Europe

A 15th-century vellum manuscript of the writing of the revered Persian physician Ibn Sīna, or Avicenna, has been found being used to bind a later book, revealing for the first time that his seminal Canon of Medicine was translated into Irish.

The manuscript had been trimmed, folded and stitched to the spine of a pocket-sized Latin manual about local administration, which was printed in London in the 1530s. It had been owned by the same family in Cornwall since the 16th century. When they decided to satisfy their curiosity about the unusual binding last year, they consulted University College Cork professor of modern Irish Pádraig Ó Macháin, who said he “knew pretty much straight away” that it was a significant find.

Related: Archive shows medieval nun faked her own death to escape convent

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Campaigners warn of 'book poverty' as UK celebrates World Book Day

Tom Watson, deputy Labour party leader, condemns fall in library borrowing as a ‘scandal’, as organisers encourage parents and children to make use of free book token

As children across the UK don Matilda and Harry Potter costumes in celebration of World Book Day, shadow culture secretary Tom Watson has condemned the “scandal” that the number of books borrowed from public libraries in England has plummeted by almost 100m since 2011.

Research commissioned by the Labour party shows that the number of books borrowed from libraries fell from 255,128,957 in 2011 to 157,387,109 in 2018 – a 38% decrease. Drawing from the data released by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa), which had already revealed that 127 public libraries closed in England, Wales and Scotland in 2018, the new research found that the north-east experienced the largest decline in book loans, down by 49%.

Related: Give older children story time to halt fall in young readers, urge experts

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Netflix to adapt One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Streaming giant buys rights to create first ever screen adaptation of Colombian author’s seminal 1967 magical realist novel

Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude to create the first screen adaptation of the author’s 1967 masterpiece.

The streaming company announced on Wednesday that the book will be adapted into a Spanish-language series and filmed largely in the Nobel prize-winning author’s home country of Colombia, with García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, serving as executive producers.

Related: From the archive, 28 June 1970: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

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Show disabled people in stories, authors urge on World Book Day

Oscar winner Rachel Shenton and Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson call for diversity

Authors have been urged to ­feature characters with disabilities in their ­stories. Marking World Book Day on Thursday, the Oscar winner Rachel ­Shenton and Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, called for more diversity in children’s books.

Shenton, who won an Oscar last year for her film about a deaf child, said: “When I wrote The Silent Child, I created a film about an issue I’m incredibly passionate about, and have experience of in my own life.

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'I can get any novel I want in 30 seconds': can book piracy be stopped?

As publishers struggle with ‘whack-a-mole’ websites, experts, authors and even Guardian readers who illegally download books, assess the damage

Abena, who is 18, recently read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, and thought it was wonderful. She does feel a bit bad about downloading it illegally, she says, but her mother is a single parent who can’t afford to feed her voracious love of books. She has also enjoyed the entire Percy Jackson series without paying its author, Rick Riordan, a penny. She’s not a thief, though, she says: “I wouldn’t take food or clothes without paying the people who made them, because they’re physical things. I believe real life and the internet differ.”

Abena (not her real name) is one of millions of people who use book-piracy websites to illegally download work by authors they love. The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their regular piracy website is shut down; when I contacted some, those who responded always justified it by claiming they were too poor to buy books – then tell me they read them on their e-readers, smartphones or computer screens - or that their areas lacked libraries, or they found it hard to locate books in the countries where they lived. Some felt embarrassed. Others blamed greedy authors for trying to stop them.

One reader said he’d pirated around 100,000 books in a few hours: 'I doubt I’ll get through even a fifth of them'

Series authors are vulnerable: when book one does well, but book two is heavily pirated, book three could end up dead in the water

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Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx retracts rape admission

Bass guitarist said he ‘pretty much’ raped a woman in band autobiography The Dirt, but now apologises for ‘possibly’ making the story up

Nikki Sixx, bassist with 1980s rock band Mötley Crüe, has apologised over a story from the band’s autobiography The Dirt in which he admitted to “pretty much” raping a woman.

In the book, Sixx recounts an incident in which he tricked a woman into believing she was having sex with him in a dark closet at a party, when it was actually bandmate Tommy Lee. The woman reported being raped later that night in a separate incident as she attempted to hitchhike home. On hearing of the second incident, Sixx said that it made him realise “I had probably gone too far … At first, I was relieved, because it meant I hadn’t raped her. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I pretty much had. I was in a zone, though, and in that zone, consequences did not exist.”

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Translated fiction enjoys sales boom as UK readers flock to European authors

On eve of Brexit, figures show unprecedented numbers of Britons are turning to translations of continental novels

As Brexit looms and the UK faces a future outside the EU, the country’s readers are gulping down European fiction at an unprecedented rate, with sales at their highest since records began.

According to research commissioned by the Man Booker International (MBI) prize from Nielsen Book, overall sales of translated fiction in the UK were up last year by 5.5%, with more than 2.6m books sold, worth £20.7m – the highest level since Nielsen began to track sales in 2001. Over the last 18 years, sales of fiction in translation have risen “steadily”, with the performance of translated literary fiction in particular standing out for its “extreme growth”, up 20% in 2018 year-on-year. Sales of English-language literary fiction over the period, meanwhile, have plateaued and are now significantly below where they stood in the mid-noughties.

1. The Thirst by Jo Nesbo

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The Who's Pete Townshend announces debut novel, The Age of Anxiety

Musician says his tale of the ‘dark art of creativity’ is part of a magnum opus that will eventually combine fiction with opera and installation art

The Who’s lead guitarist Pete Townshend has announced his debut novel The Age of Anxiety, an “extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity” that will be published in November.

Announcing the book on Tuesday, the songwriter said he decided 10 years ago to “create a magnum opus that would combine opera, art installation and novel”. The novel is now completed and has been acquired by Hodder & Stoughton imprint Coronet, with the opera in development and the art installation to follow.

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Nobel prize in literature to be awarded twice this year

The Swedish Academy will award both the 2018 and 2019 laureates, after a sexual misconduct scandal forced them to postpone the prize last year

Two Nobel prizes in literature will be awarded this year by the Swedish Academy, according to a report from a Swedish newspaper.

Last year’s award was withheld for the first time since 1949 after the august institution which decides on the winner, was hit with a sexual misconduct scandal. Following a meeting of the foundation on Tuesday, Dagens Nyheter reported that permanent secretary Anders Olsson had confirmed that two Nobel prizes for literature would be given out in 2019, to make up for the lack of a prize in 2018.

Related: The ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize

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Clintons accused of nepotism in book on US-Ireland relations

Exclusive: Policy adviser claims couple tried to gain grant for Chelsea’s boyfriend

A veteran Democratic foreign policy adviser has accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of nepotism, dishonesty and vindictiveness in an assault on a previously untouched part of the Clinton political legacy – Ireland.

Trina Vargo, who was a behind-the-scenes Washington player in Northern Ireland’s peace process, claims the couple tried to obtain a scholarship to Ireland for a boyfriend of their daughter, Chelsea, and later cut funding for the scholarship to punish Vargo for backing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination race.

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Give older children story time to halt fall in young readers, urge experts

Publisher Egmont says steep decline in parents reading to children – who thereby learn to read for pleasure – is ‘a significant threat to their wellbeing’

Experts have called on the government to make story time an intrinsic part of the school day for children right up to their teens, after two major new pieces of research revealed a decline in both the number of children being read to daily and the number reading for pleasure by themselves.

The findings of Nielsen Book Research’s annual survey into the reading habits of British children, to be revealed on Tuesday at an industry conference, show that only 32% of British children under 13 are read to daily by an adult, for pleasure, down four percentage points on the previous year, and nine percentage points down on 2012.

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Mueller report to be printed 'instantly', say publishers

Publishers prepare to race ‘the most anticipated investigative document of this century’ into print

Publishers are lining up to release special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report as a book – if and when it is made public.

The investigation into alleged collusion between Moscow and Donald Trump’s campaign for the US presidency will be delivered by Robert Mueller to the new attorney general, William Barr, who will decide how much is made public. Last week, independent press Skyhorse Publishing said it would release a book version of the report once it had access to the documents, telling Publishers Weekly that “we know that making the Mueller report instantly available will be both a public service and good business”.

Related: Trump faces a legal reckoning – but are his worst troubles yet to come?

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Non-binary trans author nominated for Women's prize for fiction

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, who does not identify as male or female, among 16 books longlisted for the £30,000 award

The Women’s prize for fiction has nominated a non-binary transgender author for the first time in its 27-year history, on a 16-book longlist featuring a previous winner, seven debuts and last year’s Booker prize winner.

Thirty-one-year-old Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi is nominated for their first novel, Freshwater. Described as “remarkable” in the Guardian’s review, Freshwater is a coming-of-age story following a child, Ada, who is born filled with Igbo spirits as a challenge from a deity to Ada’s Catholic father.

Related: Akwaeke Emezi: ‘I’d read everything – even the cereal box’

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Of love, life and literature: Athill’s last words from beyond the grave

Publishing doyenne tells of success tinged by heartache in film ‘to be seen after my death’

“I am Diana Athill, and if you are watching this I am no longer alive. This is my final say.”

With a flourish of self-conscious drama, Athill, the writer, literary editor and doyenne of British publishing, is to introduce her last, moving message to the world this week.

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Study finds Mr Greedy rivals Grapes of Wrath in reading complexity

Analysis for teaching resources body determines that Roger Hargreaves’ use of unusual words and long sentences raises demands on the reader

One of them is a Pulitzer prize-winning epic running to more than 500 pages and detailing the hardships of a family of tenant farmers during the US’s Great Depression, the other is a 36-page picture book about a pink blob with an insatiable appetite.

But in a study measuring language difficulty, statisticians have analysed the text of more than 33,000 books and determined that the language used in Roger Hargreaves’s Mr Men title Mr Greedy is only marginally less complex than that used in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Gulliver’s Travels (Unabridged) by Jonathan Swift – BL. 13.5

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Guantánamo Diary author 'blocked from travelling for medical treatment'

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was released from Guantánamo Bay in 2016 after 14 years in detention without charge, has been refused a passport to leave Mauritania

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of an internationally bestselling memoir that detailed the torture he endured as a detainee in Guantánamo Bay, says he has been denied a passport by Mauritania, the country of his birth, three years after he was released from the US detention centre.

The writer is petitioning Mauritania’s minister of the interior, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, over the denial of a passport. He had been told by the government he would be eligible to travel again two years after being released from Guantánamo. Slahi is supported by almost 200 writers, editors, publishers, teachers and human-rights advocates, who have written to Ould-Abdallah describing the rejection as “extrajudicial punishment of a man who has never engaged in terrorism nor ever been charged with or convicted of a crime”.

Related: Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi review – the global war on terror has found its true witness

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How science fiction can save us from concrete

Science fiction has predicted everything from the internet to mobile phones. Could it help us create concrete-free cities of the future?

Science fiction loves its future cities: utopian visions of gleaming steel and glass, as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and grimly exciting dystopian labyrinths as in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But SF visionaries have rarely specified the materials from which their visions might actually be made.

The original Futurama, an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes, wowed audiences with its towering apartment blocks and sweeping automated freeways (it was sponsored by General Motors). But though the design was mind-boggling, the proposed materials were still concrete and steel. New visions, but old materials.

This week Guardian Cities investigates the shocking impact of concrete on the planet, to learn what we can do to bring about a less grey world.

Related: Past visions of future cities: where are our flying cars and hoverboards?

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Travel writer Colin Thubron receives outstanding contribution award

Veteran travel writer, praised for his vivid accounts of remote destinations, is honoured at Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards

A lifetime of travelling, and detailing the sights, smells and sounds of the experience has led Colin Thubron to write more than 15 travel books, primarily on Central Asia, Russia and China. Now, after five decades as a travel writer and novelist, Thubron, 79, has received the 2019 Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing at a ceremony in Mayfair, London.

Thubron’s travel books include his 1967 debut Mirror to Damascus, as well as Among the Russians, In Siberia, Shadow of the Silk Road, and 2011’s To a Mountain in Tibet. He joins Jan Morris, Bill Bryson and Michael Palin in being a recipient of the outstanding contribution award.

Travel Memoir of the Year: The Crossway, Guy Stagg

Photography and Illustrated Travel Book of the Year: The Writer’s Map, Dr Huw Lewis

Fiction, with a Sense of Place: House of Stone, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Ordnance Survey Children’s Travel Book of the Year: Great Adventurers, Alastair Humphreys

Bradt Travel Guides New Travel Writer of the Year: Reflections of Dubai, Celia Dillow

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