Free food and $100 prizes: Alaskans rally to get challenged classics to students

After school board in Alaska pulls books by authors including F Scott Fitzgerald from the curriculum, local businesses are working to encourage reading them

A school board in Alaska has got more than it bargained for after pulling classics including The Great Gatsby and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the school curriculum, with members of the local community offering incentives to students to read the books anyway – including $100 (£80) prizes and free mac’n’cheese.

The Matanuska-Susitna borough school board in Palmer, Alaska, which oversees 46 schools, voted last week to remove five books from its curriculum for high-school English: F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and short-story collection The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. According to local paper the Frontiersman News, five members voted in favour of the removal, and two voted against. The books remain in school libraries, but will no longer be taught.

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Maj Sjöwall: ‘Nordic noir’ pioneer, author of the Martin Beck series, dies aged 84

With her husband Per Wahloo, who died in 1975, Sjöwall’s books paved the way for the likes of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson

Maj Sjöwall, one half of a Swedish crime-writing couple credited with inventing the “Nordic noir” genre, has died aged 84, her publisher said on Wednesday.

Sjöwall, a pioneer of gritty realism and an inspiration to modern crime writers, “passed away today after an extended period of illness,” Ann-Marie Skarp, head of publisher Piratforlaget, told AFP.

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Simone de Beauvoir's 'too intimate' novel to be published after 75 years

Les Inséparables, which depicts the writer’s passionate friendship with a girl who later died, was withheld during her lifetime

A novel by Simone de Beauvoir that was deemed too intimate to release in her lifetime will be published for the first time later this year.

The French writer and feminist’s Les inséparables tells the story of the “passionate and tragic” friendship she had as a young girl with Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died of encephalitis at the age of 21. Written in 1954, in the first person, the novel sees the author of feminist classic The Second Sex, published five years earlier, tell the story of the beginning of the friendship, as Andrée, or Zaza, joins the same class as Sylvie, or Simone.

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Portuguese authors collaborate on serial lockdown novel

More than 40 writers have volunteered to jointly author tale, taking turns to publish a new chapter daily, with English translations under way

A group of major Portuguese authors have found a way to keep themselves and their readers busy during the lockdown: they’re writing a serial novel, with each writer given 24 hours to respond to the previous chapter.

Portugal’s literary version of the exquisite corpse game was dreamed up by the award-winning author Ana Margarida de Carvalho, who challenged her fellow writers to join her in writing a collective, serial novel with her as Portugal went into lockdown. More than 40 responded, their story opening with a group of scientists trying to find a cure for a virus that has caused a global pandemic.

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Apocalyptic vision: the unsettling beauty of lockdown is pure sci-fi

The streets lie silent, the skies are clear, as office buildings reflect our empty cities. Coronavirus has brought with it the same eerie scenes that have long haunted the modern imagination

• The best arts and entertainment during self-isolation

The end of everything we took for normal has a dire aesthetic fascination. The streets lie silent and still under unnaturally clean skies. A lone walker stares into a deserted bookshop. Office buildings, once vulgar, fulfil their true potential as sets for a sci-fi nightmare, glassily reflecting the empty city. While I do not want to in any way downplay the tragedy that has left thousands dead and will kill thousands more, there has been one eerie byproduct: the apocalyptic beauty of lockdown Britain.

Take a walk through quiet streets for your daily exercise and you come across vistas sci-fi has spent more than a century preparing us for. A main road so still you can stand in the middle of it, among the squatting pigeons. A row of expensive shops all closed and dark midweek. Such scenes of The End have haunted the modern imagination since HG Wells described the abandoned streets of the imperial metropolis and devastated Surrey in The War of the Worlds. We’ve all absorbed these visions of apocalyptic Britain, generation after generation, from the 1970s TV chiller Survivors to Danny Boyle’s uncannily convincing dawn photography of an emptied landscape in the film 28 Days Later. Surely we can be forgiven a frisson of macabre awe at seeing all these fantasies become real.

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Terry Pratchett novels to get 'absolutely faithful' TV adaptations

Discworld fantasy stories will be adapted for TV ‘in a form he would be proud of’ after BBC America’s controversial cyberpunk take on The Watch

On what would have been the late Discworld creator’s 72nd birthday, Terry Pratchett’s production company Narrativia has announced a new development deal to create “truly authentic … prestige adaptations that remain absolutely faithful to [his] original, unique genius”.

The deal will see Motive Pictures and Endeavor Content team up with Narrativia, which Pratchett launched in 2012, to make several series adaptations of the late author’s fantasy novels. There are currently no details of which books the partnership will tackle, though many of Pratchett’s books have been adapted before: Sky has dramatised Hogfather, The Colour of Magic and Going Postal; Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters have been turned into animations, and Good Omens, starring David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale, was recently aired on Amazon Prime and the BBC, to positive reviews.

Related: Discworld fans are right to be nervous about the BBC's 'punk rock' The Watch

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Nick Hornby: BBC should be 'untouchable' after coronavirus

High Fidelity author writes fierce defence of broadcaster, praising work to help audience ‘live through and understand a crisis’

Author Nick Hornby has written an essay praising the BBC as “one of our crowning achievements as a nation”, saying that its handling of the coronavirus pandemic should make it “untouchable” once the crisis has passed.

In an essay for Penguin, Hornby writes that the BBC, which has put together its biggest ever education programme to help parents during lockdown, is helping him “to live through and understand a crisis”.

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Per Olov Enquist, celebrated Swedish author, dies aged 85

Much garlanded novelist, playwright, poet and Oscar-winning screenwriter hailed as ‘a giant among European writers’

Swedish author Per Olov Enquist, described as “a giant among European writers” by his publisher, has died at the age of 85.

The author’s family told Swedish media that he died on Saturday night after a long illness. The much-celebrated novelist, playwright and poet, known by his initials PO, was winner of the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize. His historical novel The Visit of the Royal Physician – set in the adulterous, backstabbing world of the 18th-century Danish courts, where the mad king Christian VII’s queen, the English princess Caroline Mathilde, falls in love with the court physician – won him the August prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel. It also made him the only Swedish author to take the Independent foreign fiction prize, the precursor to the International Booker, in 2001.

Related: PO Enquist: ‘An upbringing like mine marks you like a branding iron’

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Majority of authors 'hear' their characters speak, finds study

Research on writers appearing at the Edinburgh international book festival reveals 63% listen to their creations, and 61% feel they have their own agency

Some writers have always claimed they can hear their characters speaking, with Enid Blyton suggesting she could “watch and hear everything” and Alice Walker describing how her characters would “come for a visit ... and talk”. But a new study has shown this uncanny experience is very widespread, with almost two-thirds of authors reporting that they hear their characters’ voices while they work.

Researchers at Durham University teamed up with the Guardian and the Edinburgh international book festival to survey 181 authors appearing at the 2014 and 2018 festivals. Sixty-three per cent said they heard their characters speak while writing, with 61% reporting characters were capable of acting independently.

Related: Fictional characters make 'experiential crossings' into real life, study finds

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William Wordsworth's 250th anniversary marked with mass readings

Stephen Fry and Brian Cox have joined descendants of the great Romantic and members of the public to record a host of his poems

Stephen Fry and Brian Cox’s sonorous tones can be heard declaiming William Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us, Caroline Quentin is reading the Romantic poet’s Lines Written in Early Spring, and William H Macy has taken on his She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.

A host of actors and celebrities have jumped at the chance to record their favourite Wordsworth poems to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, with the poet’s descendants now appealing to the public to send in their own readings to help them build a living archive of his writing online.

Related: Poems to get us through: The First Geniuses by Billy Collins

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Show but don’t tell: why silent Zooms are golden for focusing the mind

As isolation stress sets in, many find that sharing quiet online spaces is the key to boosting brain power

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There are Zooms for pub quizzes, Zooms for dinner parties, Zooms for work meetings and now there is a Zoom for sitting together and not talking at all. Behold, the silent Zoom!

On paper, the practice of logging on to a video-conferencing site to sit with strangers for an hour without communicating may hold limited appeal. In practice, silent Zooms have become a lifeline in lockdown for users trying to focus on writing, reading, meditation and more.

Related: 'The perfect time to start': how book clubs are enduring and flourishing during Covid-19

I'm hooked - three of us continued our silent sessions over the weekend as they've proved so productive

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Abducted Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee opens Taiwan shop

Part-owner of shop that used to sell texts critical of China opens new business in Taipei

The part-owner of a Hong Kong bookstore specialising in texts critical of China’s leaders has reopened his shop in Taiwan after fleeing Hong Kong because of legal troubles.

The opening and accompanying news conference came days after a masked man threw red paint at Lam Wing-kee while he sat alone at a coffee shop in Taiwan. Lam suffered no physical injuries and showed little sign of the attack other than a red tint to his hair.

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Sexy beats: How Normal People’s ‘intimacy coordinator’ works

Ita O’Brien, who worked on the BBC version of Sally Rooney’s novel, explains her often vexed role and how she helped with a story that depends on its sex scenes

It’s easy to forget just how much sex there is in Sally Rooney’s Normal People, when many of its greatest romantic beats are carried in a furtive glance or something left unsaid. But when putting the novel’s most intimate scenes between Marianne and Connell on screen, what was once a matter of lines on the page becomes minutes of closeups on flushed and sweaty skin.

Every sex scene in the BBC’s much-anticipated adaptation, starting on Sunday, even the clumsiest teenage fumblings – a bra getting stuck over Marianne’s head, Connell tripping over his trousers – was carefully choreographed by Ita O’Brien, an “intimacy coordinator” who makes sure actors are comfortable while filming rumpy pumpy. Over the last decade, intimacy coordinators have become more commonplace on theatre, film and TV sets, particularly in the aftermath of Harvey Weinstein’s fall. Suddenly, producers and directors are falling over themselves to hire someone like O’Brien, who has worked on everything from Netflix’s Sex Education to HBO’s Watchmen and BBC’s Gangs of London.

The first episide of Normal People screens on Sunday on BBC One.

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Author of book about victim blaming bombarded with misogynist abuse

Dr Jessica Taylor has been speaking about her book Why Women are Blamed for Everything, but has received thousands of abusive messages and seen her computer hacked

A British academic whose new book is about why women are blamed for crimes committed against them has been subjected to thousands of coordinated attacks from alt-right trolls over the last week, culminating in her personal computer being hacked.

Dr Jessica Taylor, a senior lecturer in forensic and criminal psychology, is due to publish her exploration of victim blaming, Why Women are Blamed for Everything, on 27 April. Looking into what causes society to blame women who have been abused, raped, trafficked, assaulted or harassed by men, the book has drawn increasing publicity, including an appearance on Woman’s Hour.

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No-prorogation justice Lady Hale to publish memoir and guide to the law

Judge famous for ruling against Boris Johnson will recount how ‘a little girl from North Yorkshire became the most senior judge in the UK’

Lady Hale, who presided over the momentous decision to rule Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament unlawful, is set to write her memoirs, of how “a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire became the most senior judge in the United Kingdom”.

The supreme court’s first female president, who retired this year after capturing public attention with her steely handling of the prorogation case and her eye-catching array of brooches, has signed a deal with Penguin Random House imprint the Bodley Head for two books: a memoir, which will be published next year, and an exploration of the importance of the law, from why we need it to why it sometimes fails, illustrated using landmark judgments.

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Amazon revealed as mystery £250,000 donor to UK bookshops

Fundraiser for retailers facing hardship during the coronavirus pandemic reveals that benefactor is internet giant widely blamed for trade’s decline

Amazon, the internet retail giant vilified for years as public enemy No 1 to booksellers, has been revealed as the surprise mystery benefactor that donated £250,000 to help UK bookshops weather the coronavirus pandemic.

With booksellers around the country forced to close their doors to respect social distancing measures implemented by the government, a fundraiser was launched one month ago by Gayle Lazda from the London Review Bookshop, Picador’s Kishani Widyaratna and Daunt Books publisher Zeljka Marosevic to help them survive. Initially setting out to raise £10,000, with donations coming in from authors including Candice Carty-Williams, Adam Kay and David Nicholls, the funding target was quickly raised to £100,000, as organisations including Penguin Random House and the Booksellers Association weighed in.

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Malcolm Turnbull's book A Bigger Picture 'a bestseller' days after launch

Sales figures comes as publisher Hardie Grant furious at Morrison government for not taking copyright seriously

The former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir, A Bigger Picture, has already been branded a bestseller by his publisher as a furious book industry demands Scott Morison reaffirm his commitment to copyright protection after its pirating by a prime ministerial adviser.

The book has dominated the non-coronavirus news for the last week with Turnbull’s account of his life, and his time in politics up to the point of what he calls the 2018 coup that saw him removed from the office of prime minister.

Related: Former News Corp chief says Turnbull overstates role of Murdoch media in political downfall

It's World Book and Copyright Day so to celebrate I'm reading the Hafey Years by Elliot Cartledge What are you reading? pic.twitter.com/MUEPDP95tz

Related: Malcolm Turnbull book publisher has list of 'legion' recipients of unauthorised copies

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Britons are reading more in lockdown, says survey for World Book Night

The Reading Agency, which runs the annual event going ahead on Thursday in curtailed form, says there has been a particular spike among younger readers

Brits are turning to books in lockdown, with one in three reading more since Boris Johnson told the country on 23 March to stay at home, according to a new survey.

Marking the annual World Book Night on Thursday, the survey from the Reading Agency of more than 2,000 people in the UK found that 31% were reading more since lockdown began, with the charity noting a “particular spike”, of 45%, among young people aged between 18 and 24.

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Malcolm Turnbull book publisher has list of 'legion' recipients of unauthorised copies

Publisher reaches settlement with Scott Morrison’s adviser Nico Louw. Asked whether senior political figures were among those sent the memoir, CEO says, ‘How senior do you want?’

Some of the biggest names in politics will be drawn into the controversy over pirating of Malcolm Turnbull’s autobiography after his publisher reached a settlement on the issue.

On Tuesday evening Hardie Grant reached a settlement with Scott Morrison’s adviser Nico Louw over claims he distributed unauthorised copies of Turnbull’s book, A Bigger Picture, before its formal release on Monday.

Related: Government officials who allegedly distributed Malcolm Turnbull's book face legal action

Related: ‘Scott is a control freak’: what Malcolm Turnbull’s new book tells us about his relationship with Morrison

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Women’s prize for fiction shortlist led by Mantel, Evaristo and O'Farrell

Finalists for the £30,000 prize announced after ‘a long Zoom meeting’ were praised by judges for engaging with the biggest contemporary issues

Set in an Elizabethan England haunted by the threat of plague, Maggie O’Farrell’s unexpectedly timely novel about the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, will go up against Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.

The novels, which are among the biggest books of 2020, lead a heavyweight shortlist that will compete this autumn for the £30,000 prize. Bernadine Evaristo’s Booker prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other, that follows a cast of 12 characters, mainly black women, is also among the finalists, as are Jenny Offill’s Weather, an exploration of climate anxiety; Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, a retelling of the Trojan war from the perspectives of the women involved; and Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, about a teenage girl who is married off to an older man in order to get her family out of the Dominican Republic and into the US.

Related: Women's prize at 25: what it is like to win by Zadie Smith, Naomi Alderman and more

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LGBTQ children’s books face record calls for bans in US libraries

Annual list of the most challenged books includes Alex Gino’s George, about a transgender girl, and John Oliver’s picture book about a gay rabbit, A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo

Attempts to remove books from libraries across the US rose almost a fifth last year, with children’s books featuring LGBTQ characters making up 80% of the most challenged books.

The American Library Association’s annual list of the most challenged books in public, school and academic libraries was topped by Alex Gino’s George, which has made the top 10 every year since it was published in 2015. Objections to the book, about a child who “knows she’s not a boy”, cited sexual references and conflict with “traditional family structure”, with some saying schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”.

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Philip Pullman: ministers should face charges if Brexit politics slowed PPE

Novelist says government should be ‘charged with conspiracy to murder’ if reluctance to work with the EU obstructed provision

Philip Pullman has said that the UK government “should be arraigned on charges of conspiracy to murder” if it is found that “for Brexit-related reasons” MPs did not take part in the EU procurement scheme to buy PPE.

The government has previously said it was unable to join the EU schemes as it had not received an email of invitation. But the Guardian revealed last week that the UK missed three opportunities to be part of the EU scheme to bulk-buy masks, gowns and gloves.

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Government officials who allegedly distributed Malcolm Turnbull's book face legal action

Amid publishers’ threats to refer matter to federal police, copyright law experts say pursuing a civil case would be more straightforward

Federal government officials who allegedly distributed Malcolm Turnbull’s book before its release could face a possible criminal prosecution if it was shown they were responsible for a “commercial-scale” copyright breach, experts say.

But amid threats by the publisher to refer potential criminal breaches to the Australian federal police, copyright law specialists said the company and the former prime minister might have a better chance of bringing a civil lawsuit.

Related: Former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: 'You don't suck up to bullies'

Related: Morrison adviser apologises for sending out Malcolm Turnbull’s unreleased memoir

Related: Malcolm Turnbull on sex and trust: 'How could I confirm the deputy PM lied to the prime minister?'

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‘This is beyond the Great Depression’: will comic books survive coronavirus?

As Marvel cuts staff and publishers stop selling new titles, artists, shop owners and writers worry for the future of an industry worth billions

There are no new comic books. Steve Geppi, head of Diamond Comic Distributors, which distributes nearly every comic sold in the anglophone world (or used to), announced this on 23 March, though senior industry figures already knew what was coming. The coronavirus pandemic had sunk retailers deep into the red. They couldn’t pay their bills to Diamond or rent to their landlords, because they hadn’t made any sales. “Product distributed by Diamond and slated for an on-sale date of 1 April or later will not be shipped to retailers until further notice,” Geppi wrote.

If shops can’t pay Diamond, Diamond can’t pay the industry’s constellation of comics publishers, who then can’t pay artists, writers, editors and printers, who now can’t pay their rent or credit card bills – or buy comics. Sales of comics, graphic novels and collectibles distributed by Diamond were $529.7m (£462m) in 2019 – a huge number which suggests that a months-long gap between issues of Batman, Captain America and Spawn will stretch into tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. (Though Diamond plans to start shipping comics to shops again on 17 May, many around the world will still be in lockdown then.)

A hit comic paves the way for a hit movie, then a hit video game, then a toy line. Before you know it, you’ve made billions

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International Booker prize postponed due to coronavirus

Publishers of novels shortlisted for the £50,000 prize appeal to organisers as book sales take a battering under lockdown

The six authors up for this year’s International Booker prize will have to wait a little longer to find out who won. The announcement has been postponed until the summer due to the severe impact of the coronavirus outbreak on book sales.

The winner of the £50,000 award for the best novel translated into English, shared equally between author and translator, was due to be announced on 19 May. But prize organisers say that the announcement of the shortlist on 2 April exposed the difficulties that readers were having getting hold of books during the lockdown.

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Carol Ann Duffy leads British poets creating 'living record' of coronavirus

Major names including Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay and father-and-son poets Ian and Andrew McMillan to document outbreak in verse

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Carol Ann Duffy has launched an international poetry project with major names including Imtiaz Dharker, Roger McGough and Ian McMillan, as a response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The former poet laureate hopes the project, entitled Write Where We Are Now, “will provide an opportunity for reflection and inspiration in these challenging times, as well as creating a living record of what is happening as seen through our poets’ eyes and ears, in their gardens or garrets”.

Related: Carol Ann Duffy's poems to get us through: Adult Fiction by Ian McMillan

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Letters reveal postnatal crisis of Barbara Hepworth

Previously unpublished correspondence sheds new light on artist’s struggle to pursue career while caring for triplets alone

For decades, Barbara Hepworth has been portrayed as a coldly ambitious artist who sent her children away when they were infants so that she could focus on her work. Now, however, that view is to be challenged by previously unpublished letters showing how deeply Hepworth struggled to care alone for her newborn triplets, and how she agonised over what to do for the best.

Hepworth’s plunge into postnatal crisis, revealed in a major new book about the Hampstead modernists, is detailed in letters written by her and her friends in the aftermath of the babies’ birth in 1934. They shed new light on Hepworth’s feelings about her children and her relationship with their father, the artist Ben Nicholson.

The thought of not having them with her made her deeply unhappy, but the thought of not working also made her unhappy

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Morrison's senior adviser accused of pirating Malcolm Turnbull’s unreleased memoir

Former PM and publisher believe unauthorised digital copies were distributed with encouragement to forward on

A legal clash embarrassing to Scott Morison is looming with claims a senior adviser to the prime minister has pirated Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir before official publication on Monday.

Lawyers for Turnbull and his publisher Hardie Grant believe unauthorised digital copies of the book, A Bigger Picture, were widely distributed with recipients encouraged to forward them to others.

Related: Malcolm Turnbull: News Corp is like a political party with the Murdochs encouraging intolerance

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Inside MinaLima: the fantastic world of Harry Potter prop design

The graphic design studio which created the Potter spellbooks, newspapers, tickets and posters on their latest magical book

In Soho, not far from the location of Diagon Alley, the magical world of Harry Potter has carved out an intriguing legacy. The House of MinaLima gallery holds the work of the graphic design studio which created most of the props from the Harry Potter films including spellbooks, the Daily Prophet newspaper, tickets and posters. The Marauders Map covers the floor in the gallery’s exquisitely designed rooms. The House started as a pop-up in 2017 but looks here to stay – a second gallery has now opened in Japan.

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All alone online: Iggy Pop and Jeremy Irons lead mass Ancient Mariner reading

Streaming daily, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 2020 incarnation also features Marianne Faithfull and Tilda Swinton as readers, set against sound and fine art

“Alone, alone, all, all alone.” The cry of the Ancient Mariner, immortalised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, feels particularly apposite today as the world self-isolates. Now the 18th-century poem is set to be reimagined, in a daily online reading by stars from Marianne Faithfull to Iggy Pop, Jeremy Irons and Tilda Swinton for a world audience in lockdown.

The Ancient Mariner Big Read, which launches on Saturday and was commissioned by The Arts Institute at Plymouth University, will see the 150-verse poem divided into 40 readings, with readers from Faithfull to Irons each recording three or four verses to be broadcast daily for free. (Faithfull recorded it before being hospitalised with the coronavirus.) The project will combine the readings with works from major artists including Marina Abramović, and refocus on the poem’s “urgent ecological message”.

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Stars including Paul McCartney and Emilia Clarke to share stories of NHS care in new book

Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You has been assembled from some of the best-known voices in the UK in a week and will be published in July

Adam Kay, who has topped bestseller charts with his stories of life as as junior doctor in This Is Going to Hurt, is pulling together a book of “love letters to the NHS” from major names including Paul McCartney, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson.

Kay started the project a week ago and already has 100 contributors signed up, from authors such as Lee Child, Jacqueline Wilson, EL James and Jilly Cooper to presenters including Graham Norton, Emily Maitliss and Peter Kay, actors from Dawn French to Emilia Clarke and Joanna Lumley, and sportspeople including Peter Crouch and Tanni Grey-Thompson.

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Self-isolate like a king: why Henry VIII is a role model for staying in

Book tells how he was familiar with quarantine and drew comfort from confined spaces

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As a role model for living through lockdown, one might not immediately turn to King Henry VIII – a monarch better known for his acquisitive attitude to monasteries and wives than his habits for solitude and quiet contemplation.

In fact, argues a leading expert in the period, Henry was very familiar with quarantine – and there are lessons we can learn from this unlikeliest of figures when it comes to his approach to confinement.

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Malcolm Turnbull on sex and trust: 'How could I confirm the deputy PM lied to the prime minister?'

In his memoir, former PM writes of his anger over Barnaby Joyce’s affair, tells how Credlin ‘dominated’ Abbott and savages George Christensen’s ‘hypocrisy’

Malcolm Turnbull has revealed details of a rare moment of prime-ministerial calm interrupted by the intrusion of Barnaby Joyce’s sex life.

In his memoir A Bigger Picture, to be released Monday, Turnbull tells of sitting quietly in his Parliament House office on Thursday 11 May 2017, contemplating the reception of the budget delivered that Tuesday.

Related: ‘Scott is a control freak’: what Malcolm Turnbull’s new book tells us about his relationship with Morrison

Related: Guardian Australia owes Malcolm Turnbull thanks – but not favours | Lenore Taylor

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Chilean author, campaigner and escapee Luis Sepúlveda dies aged 70 of Covid-19

Dramatic career took in escapes from Pinochet’s regime in the 70s, sailing with Greenpeace and writing books including The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

The celebrated Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who was exiled by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, has died from Covid-19.

Best known for his 1992 novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and 1996’s The Story of a Seagull and The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly, Sepúlveda died in hospital on Thursday. He first began showing symptoms from coronavirus on 25 February, after returning to his home in Spain from a festival in Portugal. On 1 March, it was confirmed that Sepúlveda was the first case of Covid-19 in the Asturias region, where he had lived for 20 years.

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Chart flop: VisitBritain sorry for literary map ignoring Wales and Scotland

The nation’s official tourism agency published a map of inspiring bookish sights that left Wales ‘depicted as trees’ and Scotland guillotined

VisitBritain has apologised after publishing a map of British literature that appeared to suggest Wales’s only contribution to the literary history of the British Isles was a few trees.

Published on Wednesday on the Twitter account of Britain’s official tourism body, the map invited users to “explore the places” that inspired books including Dracula, Harry Potter and Wuthering Heights, “and sent British literature around the world”.

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‘Dress rehearsal for catastrophe’: how Stoics are speaking to locked-down readers

Sales of works by ancient Roman Marcus Aurelius have seen a sharp uptick in recent months. Which makes calm sense

• Our writers on books to read during lockdown

‘Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest. ‘It is my bad luck that this has happened to me.’ No, you should rather say: ‘It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’”

Is that Gal Gadot, roused from lockdown to offer another snippet of comfort to her followers? No, it’s Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, reflecting on his life in the second century AD in what came to be known as his Meditations. It’s just one Stoic text that has seen a “noticeable uplift” in sales during the coronavirus pandemic, alongside Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realise how unnecessary many things are

Related: Lessons in Stoicism by John Sellars review – what ancient philosophers teach us about how to live

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Margaret Atwood: Covid-19 lockdown is not a dystopia

The Handmaid’s Tale author says ‘people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism’

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Margaret Atwood, who has created dystopias from Gilead to the collapsed civilisation of Oryx and Crake, has spoken: our locked-down world might be “an unpleasant, frightening, disagreeable place you don’t want to be”, but it is not dystopian.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Emma Barnett, Atwood said that “a dystopia, technically, is an arranged unpleasant society that you don’t want to be living in. This one was not arranged. So people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism. It’s not a deliberate arrangement.”

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The Infinite by Patience Agbabi review – time-travel adventure

An engaging autistic 12-year-old is the heroine of this eco-thriller that marks poet Agbabi’s debut for young readers

The heroine of poet Patience Agbabi’s debut novel, for eight-to-12 year olds, is special in several ways. Twelve-year-old Elle lives in a British town with her Nigerian grandmother; Mum died in a car crash and Dad left soon after. Elle is autistic, and can find ordinary life a bit tricky. She is a “Leapling” too, born on 29 February, and – last but definitely not least – she is one of the few such children who have “The Gift”, an ability to leap through time.

Elle is a pupil at Intercalary International, a school for kids with a variety of special needs, but things aren’t going well for her. Learning to control The Gift is hard, and she is being bullied. She’s looking forward to a school trip, though, a “Leap” to the HQ of the Time Squad in the year 2048. They are the guardians of chronology, an elite group of time travellers who stop criminals from changing the past and rupturing the space-time continuum. There’s a strong environmental theme here – the future is pretty much carbon neutral and meat free, and the Time Squad is tough on all eco-crimes.

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Malcolm Turnbull: News Corp is like a political party with the Murdochs encouraging intolerance

In his new book the former Australian PM accuses the company of helping to run the country through deferential leaders like Tony Abbott

News Corp operates like a political party, working closely with rightwing politicians to influence policy and elections and to destroy politicians who won’t agree to a partnership with the Murdochs, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says.

“I wasn’t going to run my government in partnership with Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch or their editors, and I knew [News Corp would] resent that,” Turnbull writes in his memoir, which was leaked by the Australian on Thursday.

Related: ‘Scott is a control freak’: what Malcolm Turnbull’s new book tells us about his relationship with Morrison

Related: Guardian Australia owes Malcolm Turnbull thanks – but not favours | Lenore Taylor

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Margaret Atwood to showcase gothic puppet show for Mary Beard

Author will present her unique take on an Edgar Allen Poe tale on Beard’s BBC Two arts show

Margaret Atwood will show how she has gone from handmaids’ tales to handmade tales when she unveils her latest project: a puppet show version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

The novelist is to be a guest on Mary Beard’s BBC Two arts show Front Row Late, hosted in lockdown from the study in Beard’s house. Atwood’s contribution is what Beard calls a “very surprising” version of Poe’s horror story: a puppet show choreographed by the author and her sister Ruth, with all the characters made from household objects.

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How EM Forster saw the lockdown coming | Brief letters

The Machine Stops | The Mirror and The Light | Being extremely vulnerable | West Sussex canals

Anyone else rereading EM Forster’s amazingly prescient short story The Machine Stops? He writes of a universe where people live in cells connected to computers which provide access to food, medical needs, entertainment, socialisation etc. The population is described as having pasty faces and white blobby legs atrophied from lack of use. Sound familiar?
Ruth Lewis
Potters Bar, Hertfordshire

• John Crace said he couldn’t get past page 4 of The Mirror and the Light (Another tricky week for my mental health but a saucepan hat helped, 10 April). I wonder how many people have actually finished it? I have, so feel qualified to speculate – could it be that the gushing of the critics is akin to that of the dutiful citizens in The Emperor’s New Clothes?
Ursula Hutchinson
Newport, Isle of Wight

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Yayoi Kusama's message to Covid-19: 'Disappear from this earth'

The veteran Japanese avant-garde artist has issued a poem of defiance in the teeth of the ‘terrible monster’, the coronavirus pandemic

• The best arts and entertainment during self-isolation
• Coronavirus and culture – a list of major cancellations

Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most popular living artists, has responded to the global coronavirus crisis with a message of defiance.

The reclusive 91-year-old, celebrated for her polka-dot artworks and installations, has written what she says is a message to the whole world.

Today, with the world facing Covid-19, I feel the necessity to address it with this message:

A MESSAGE FROM YAYOI KUSAMA TO THE WHOLE WORLD

Though it glistens just out of reach, I continue to pray for hope to shine through

Its glimmer lighting our way

This long-awaited great cosmic glow

Now that we find ourselves on the dark side of the world

The gods will be there to strengthen the hope we have spread throughout the universe

Revolutionist of the world by the Art

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Oxford dictionary revised to record linguistic impact of Covid-19

OED lexicographers report seeing huge rise in ‘a very short period of time’ of many coronavirus-related terms including self-isolation and WFH

With terms such as WFH, social distancing and self-isolation now in common parlance, the Oxford English Dictionary has made an extraordinary update to include Covid-19 and words related to the pandemic in its definitive record of the English language.

The dictionary’s executive editor Bernadette Paton said that it was “a rare experience for lexicographers to observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to come overwhelmingly to dominate global discourse, even to the exclusion of most other topics”. Covid-19 has done that, and has thus been added as a new entry in the OED, where it is described as “an acute respiratory illness in humans caused by a coronavirus, which is capable of producing severe symptoms and death, esp. in the elderly and others with underlying health conditions”.

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Many Italian bookshops to remain closed despite easing of lockdown

Large number of bookshop owners say they have no intention of reopening while pandemic continues

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When the Italian government declared that books were “essential goods”, paving the way for bookshops to be among the first businesses to emerge from the coronavirus lockdown on Tuesday, there was no rush to pull up the shutters, as might have been expected from an industry that has been battling for survival for years.

“I will be very happy to reopen as soon as we can do so safely,” said Nicoletta Maldini, a partner in Libreria Trame, a bookshop in the heart of Bologna. “At some point we will need to restart, but until then we need to move with caution and respect.”

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City Lights devotees give $500,000 to help bookshop survive coronavirus

Iconic San Francisco store that published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl announced on Friday it was in crisis, and quickly drew ‘outpouring of love’ on GoFundMe

City Lights, the iconic San Francisco bookshop and publisher founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, has raised almost half a million dollars in four days after it launched an appeal to readers warning that its future was in danger because of the coronavirus pandemic.

On Friday, chief executive Elaine Katzenberger warned that the City Lights, which was the first all-paperback bookstore in the US and famously released Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1955, was facing “formidable challenges”. Closed to the public since 16 March, with no immediate prospect of reopening, Katzenberger said the shop was not even processing online orders, because it wanted its staff to remain safely at home.

Related: City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti: 'The US isn't ready for a revolution'

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Jess Hill wins $50,000 Stella prize for See What You Made Me Do, book investigating domestic violence

Journalist’s ‘incredibly powerful’ work the result of four years of research into domestic abuse, with lens turned firmly on perpetrators

“Domestic abuse and coercive control steals people’s language away from them,” says Jess Hill. She has spent the past six years of her life trying to give it back.

Hill has won two Walkleys, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards for her reporting on domestic violence. Now, she can add the Stella prize to that list.

Related: Stella prize 2020: a reader's guide to the shortlist from Jess Hill to Charlotte Wood

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Stella prize 2020: watch the $50,000 literary award announcement here

Hosted by Patricia Karvelas, with a speech by Julia Gillard, the ceremony will be streamed below from 8pm AEST on Tuesday 14 April

The Stella prize has been a major feature of the Australian literary landscape since it was first awarded in 2013. The annual award celebrates the best Australian writing by women in any genre.

Due to social distancing measures, this year’s awards ceremony was pre-recorded, and will be streamed here via YouTube at 8pm AEST on Tuesday 14 April, presented by the Wheeler Centre. The event will be hosted by Patricia Karvelas, featuring the former prime minister Julia Gillard as special guest speaker. The winner will be announced by the chair of the 2020 judging panel, Louise Swinn.

Related: Stella prize 2020: a reader's guide to the shortlist from Jess Hill to Charlotte Wood

See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill (Black Inc)

Diving Into Glass by Caro Llewellyn (Penguin Random House)

There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett (Hachette Australia)

Here Until August by Josephine Rowe (Black Inc)

The Yield by Tara June Winch (Penguin Random House)

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin)

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Where now for travel? Lonely Planet closures point to an uncertain future

As the travel publisher closes its Melbourne and London offices, a former guidebook writer asks what’s next for an industry in crisis

Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. However, the famous guidebooks will continue to be published, though they are temporarily on hold.

As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.

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Poem constructed from emails received during quarantine goes viral

Jessica Salfia’s widely shared poem First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining has the refrain ‘As you know, many people are struggling’

Everyone has received at least one and now they’ve been elevated to poetry: a US teacher has highlighted corporate opportunism during the coronavirus outbreak, in a viral poem titled First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining.

Jessica Salfia, an English teacher and writer in West Virginia, posted the poem on Twitter on Saturday. “In these uncertain times / as we navigate the new normal, / Are you willing to share your ideas and solutions? / As you know, many people are struggling,” the poem begins.

This poem is called “First lines of emails I’ve received while quarantining.” pic.twitter.com/4keCqPaO63

Related: 'Everyone is pulling together': poems by NHS workers to raise money for Covid-19 appeal

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Chinese writer faces online backlash over Wuhan lockdown diary

Internet users accuse Fang Fang of handing foreigners ‘a giant sword’ to attack China

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A Chinese writer who published a diary during her time under lockdown in Wuhan has been subjected to widespread online criticism for publishing her book in English and German.

Fang Fang has been accused of contributing to a negative international narrative on China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

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‘Weird tale’ by Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett discovered

Christmas in the Fog, written for adults, is to be republished in Queens of the Abyss, an anthology of lost stories

The darker side of Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of classic children’s novels including The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, is set to be revealed by a forgotten story found in the archives of the British Library, untouched for more than 100 years.

The British-American Hodgson Burnett is best remembered today for her The Secret Garden, the 1911 tale of a girl who comes from India to the isolated Yorkshire moors, and 1886’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, about a poor boy from Brooklyn who discovers he has inherited an English estate.

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Mrs Hinch cleans up with book sales as Britons tidy homes in lockdown

Instagram ‘cleanfluencer’ Sophie Hinchcliffe’s The Little Book of Lists topples Hilary Mantel and David Walliams on charts

Instagram “cleanfluencer” Mrs Hinch has toppled Hilary Mantel and David Walliams to return to the top of the book charts as Britons stuck at home turn to tidying their rooms with a vengeance.

Leapfrogging Mantel’s novel The Mirror and the Light and Walliams’ new children’s book Slime into the overall No 1 spot in the UK’s book charts, The Little Book of Lists is a collection of “life-changing” lists about cleaning routines by Mrs Hinch – real name Sophie Hinchcliffe – who has 3.3 million followers on Instagram. The book also contains cleaning plans by the author and provides space for readers’ own. “Fresh’n Up Friday”, for example, lays out tasks such as “make and spray bed” and “polish/organise dressing table”.

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Government rejects bid to turn Oscar Wilde’s prison into an arts centre

Campaign to convert the former prison was backed by Reading council and luminaries including Stephen Fry but rejected by the Ministry of Justice

The Ministry of Justice has rejected a bid to turn Reading prison, where Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years in 1895, into an arts centre.

The Grade II-listed building, which closed as a working jail in 2014, was put up for sale last year. Campaigners launched a bid to turn the site into an arts hub, attracting support from writers including Stephen Fry and Julian Barnes. But Reading borough council said on Tuesday that the MoJ has declined its attempt to buy the prison.

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'Biography' of Nineteen Eighty-Four leads Orwell prize longlist

Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth is among the contenders for the political writing award named after the dystopian classic’s author

Dorian Lynskey’s “biography” of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four has made it on to the longlist for the Orwell prize for political writing.

Set up by the Orwell Foundation, the £3,000 prize is intended to reward those books that best meet Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”. Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, which traces the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the time Orwell spent fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, is up against 11 other titles. These include Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman’s exposé The Windrush Betrayal, Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, about the gender data gap, and the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir of life as a teacher, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.

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I've been reading more dystopian fiction than ever during the corona crisis. Here's why | Caroline Zielinski

Light holiday fiction just doesn’t help when nobody knows when they will be allowed to go anywhere again

For the first time in my life, I am living with curtailed liberties. Living in the midst of a pandemic has left me with a disturbing sense of unreality, where everything that was once familiar and comforting – like going to a nice restaurant or browsing in a bookstore – has morphed into a potential death threat. I once found my home a respite, but being forced to stay inside all day has increasingly turned it into a source of anxiety.

Perversely, I have found that the best way to cope with this experience is to delve into dystopian fiction. My usual diet of light, escapist literature has been replaced by books featuring bleak futures, where people are forced to grapple with new devastating realities wrought by climate change, biowarfare, pandemics, totalitarian governments or technology – choose your own misadventure. Other kinds of novels now seem irrelevant: why would I read about a bunch of friends who go on a holiday together when no one knows when they will next be allowed to leave their home, let alone the country?

Related: Filth in a time of handwashing: why lockdown erotica is the hottest trend in publishing

The protagonist’s gumption gives me hope: if she can survive the worst of all situations, surely we can, too?

Related: Julia Baird on finding light in the dark: 'Coronavirus will leave a massive psychic scar'

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The original Lydia? Portrait discovery delights Jane Austen museum

Mary Pearson, who was engaged to Austen’s brother, is thought to have been model for Pride and Prejudice’s bad Bennet girl

A newly discovered portrait of a woman who likely inspired one of Jane Austen’s most gleefully spirited characters has been acquired by a museum devoted to the novelist’s life and work.

Mary Pearson was briefly engaged to Austen’s dashing brother Henry and is widely thought to have been the model for Lydia, the bad Bennet girl who runs away with a soldier in Pride and Prejudice.

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French writers' coronavirus getaways prompt backlash

Accounts of bucolic isolation by Leïla Slimani and Marie Darrieussecq prompt charges of elitism and comparisons to Marie Antoinette

Leïla Slimani and Marie Darrieussecq may be two of France’s most acclaimed writers – but their accounts of life in lockdown in their second homes in the countryside have unleashed an outpouring of resentment among French readers, with one fellow writer even comparing Slimani to Marie Antoinette.

Slimani, who won the Prix Goncourt for her bestselling novel Lullaby, wrote in Le Monde of how she had left Paris and sequestered herself and her children in their countryside second home since 13 March, telling them that it was “a bit like Sleeping Beauty”. “Tonight, I couldn’t sleep,” she wrote. “Through my bedroom window, I watched dawn break over the hills. The icy grass, the lime trees on the branches of which the first buds appear.”

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Larry David comes out in support of Woody Allen after reading memoir

The Curb Your Enthusiasm star praises Allen’s book, Apropos of Nothing, after protests greeted the first attempt to publish it

Larry David has expressed his support for Woody Allen after reading the latter’s newly published autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, saying: “It’s hard to [think] that this guy did anything wrong.”

In an interview published in the New York Times, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star and Seinfeld co-creator said : “Yeah, it’s pretty great, it’s a fantastic book, so funny … You feel like you’re in the room with him … and it’s hard to walk away after reading that book thinking that this guy did anything wrong.”

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Jacqueline Wilson reveals publicly that she is gay

Her long partnership with Trish is ‘old news’ to those who know her, but announcing Love Frankie, her new gay love story, she has chosen to tell readers

Jacqueline Wilson has spoken publicly for the first time about her personal life, and the fact she has been living “very happily” with her partner Trish for the last 18 years.

The bestselling children’s novelist, who has often been asked why she hasn’t written more about gay characters, tackles the topic in her 111th book, Love Frankie, in which tomboy Frankie falls for Sally, the prettiest girl in her class. Wilson told Guardian Review in an interview published on Saturday that she had put her “heart and soul” into the story, and said she knew “perfectly well that it would shine a little light on my own private life”.

Related: Jacqueline Wilson: 'I've never really been in any kind of closet'

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Stay in your cave: the Gruffalo lends a claw to the coronavirus effort

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s characters step up to help children through crisis

• Coronavirus – latest updates
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Who has terrible tusks and terrible claws, purple prickles all over his back – and always maintains a strict two-metre distance from others when outside his cave?

The answer, as any young child knows, is the Gruffalo, but not as you have ever seen him before.

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Booksellers struggle with lack of new stock amid Covid-19 crisis

Shops forced to shut by coronavirus had been surviving with online sales, but difficulties ordering titles present fresh threat

Amazon has denied reports that it is no longer accepting new deliveries of books to its warehouses while prioritising essential goods amid the coronavirus outbreak, as major cutbacks at the UK’s two main book wholesalers have begun to prevent bookshops up and down the country from acquiring new stock.

Amid reports in publications such as the Times that the online retail giant was turning away book deliveries to focus on household essentials and medical supplies, Amazon told the Guardian on Friday that it is still accepting new stock from publishers.

Related: Delivery by skateboard? Coronavirus sees indie booksellers get inventive

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International Booker prize shortlist led by 28-year-old’s debut

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld joins five other ‘expansively imagined’ novels contending for £50,000 award

Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has become one of the youngest writers to be shortlisted for a Booker prize, after their debut novel made the final line-up for the International Booker.

Rijneveld, a rising star in Dutch literature, is 28 – slightly older than British author Daisy Johnson was when she was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2018, age 27. The author, who identifies as male and uses the pronouns they/them, was shortlisted after a six-hour virtual judging meeting for the £50,000 prize, which is shared equally between writer and translator, for The Discomfort of Evening, translated by Michele Hutchison. The novel, tells of a girl whose brother dies in a skating accident and draws from Rijneveld’s own experiences: when they were three, their 12-year-old brother was knocked over and killed by a bus.

Related: 'My family are too frightened to read my book': meet Europe's most exciting authors

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Dolly Parton pledges $1m to coronavirus vaccine research

Donation to comes as singer launches bedtime story video series for children in lockdown

Dolly Parton has donated $1m (£800,000) to research into a coronavirus vaccine, as she begins a new storytelling series for children in lockdown.

The country music star wrote on Instagram:

My longtime friend Dr Naji Abumrad, who’s been involved in research at Vanderbilt for many years, informed me that they were making some exciting advancements towards that research of the coronavirus for a cure. I am making a donation of $1 million to Vanderbilt towards that research and to encourage people that can afford it to make donations.

Related: A-listers lend talents to bedtime story initiative during lockdown

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Discovery of letters shines light on Thomas Hardy's second marriage

Author’s second wife, Florence Dugdale, tells of celebrity pressures, and joy at living with ‘one of the kindest men in the world’

Touching newly discovered letters written by Thomas Hardy’s second wife reveal her joy at their union and, later, her sadness at life without the great author after his death – but also highlight the media pressure the celebrity couple faced more than a century ago.

In a letter written shortly after their wedding, Florence Dugdale portrayed Hardy as “one of the kindest, most humane men in the world” while acknowledging that his fame led to the constant attention of the press in the UK and US.

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A-listers lend talents to bedtime story initiative during Covid lockdown

Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong’o among those signed up to Instagram Live initiative to raise money for charity

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As culture adapts to the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 outbreak there have been myriad new online formats, from viral pop parody videos and impromptu classical concerts to TikTok dance-offs and marathon DJ sets. But now the online cultural arms race has shifted to another, less likely, target: the humble bedtime story.

Several Hollywood actors, music stars and politicians have become children’s storytellers in an effort to support charities and bring some levity during the Covid-19 outbreak, as experts extol the importance of regular routines for parents and children.

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Edinburgh's August festivals cancelled due to coronavirus

Fringe joins international, book and art festivals and military tattoo in pulling plug

• Edinburgh absence will be felt throughout arts world
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Edinburgh’s five August festivals, which were due to welcome audiences of more than 4.4 million people and 25,000 artists have in effect been cancelled.

The fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival, on Wednesday joined with the city’s book, art and international festivals and military tattoo, to announce that the plug was being pulled on preparations for this year

Related: Coronavirus and culture – a list of major cancellations

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