More than 200 writers and publishers sign letter in support of trans and non-binary people

Described as ‘a message of love and solidarity’ and with signatories including Jeanette Winterson and Malorie Blackman, it comes days after a host of prominent literary names signed a letter defending JK Rowling

Days after a host of prominent literary names signed a letter defending JK Rowling “against hate”, more than 200 writers, publishers and journalists including Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman and Joanne Harris have put their names to another stating their support for transgender and non-binary people.

The letter, which is described as “a message of love and solidarity for the trans and non-binary community”, was pulled together by acclaimed writers Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Daisy Johnson. With signatories also including Juno Dawson, Elizabeth Day, Max Porter, Nikesh Shukla, Sara Collins, Irenosen Okojie, Mary Jean Chan, Naoise Dolan, Olivia Sudjic, Sharlene Teo and Patrick Ness, it states that “non-binary lives are valid, trans women are women, trans men are men, trans rights are human rights”.

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Many GCSE pupils never study a book by a BAME author

Exam board AQA features no black writers on GCSE English literature syllabus

Pupils could complete their GCSEs and leave secondary school in England without studying a single work of literature by a non-white author, research has found.

The largest exam board in the country, AQA, does not feature a single book by a black author among set texts for its GCSE English literature syllabus, according to a report by the education charity Teach First.

Related: Black British history: the row over the school curriculum in England

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Number of young adult writers of colour doubles to almost 20%

Research shows improvement in diversity of YA writers but comes with warning about domination by US authors

The proportion of authors of colour writing for young adults in the UK has more than doubled in the last two years.

Research from University College London associate professor Melanie Ramdarshan Bold has found that 19.6% of YA authors published in the UK in 2019 were people of colour, compared with 7.1% in 2017 and 13.25% in 2018.

Related: Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé: the 21-year-old British student with a million-dollar book deal

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Eddie Redmayne condemns 'vitriol' aimed at JK Rowling after her trans rights comments

Fantastic Beasts star also defends trans friends who face discrimination ‘on a daily basis’

Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne has said he is alarmed by the “vitriol” aimed at Harry Potter author JK Rowling after her comments on trans rights, adding the reaction on social media was “absolutely disgusting”.

Redmayne was speaking to the Daily Mail during the shoot of the third Fantastic Beasts film, which is produced and co-written by Rowling. He said he had sent her a private note.

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France divided over calls for Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine to be reburied in Panthéon

Petition says the poets, who were lovers as young men, were ‘the French Oscar Wildes’ and deserve to rest in the mausoleum

France’s cultural elite are split over whether the remains of two of the country’s greatest poets, Arthur Rimbaud and his lover Paul Verlaine, should be dug up and re-interred in the Panthéon in Paris.

The secular mausoleum is home to French greats including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Zola, Alexandre Dumas and Marie Curie. Now a petition signed by more than 5,000 people, including culture minister Roselyne Bachelot and a host of her predecessors, is calling on president Emmanuel Macron to allow Rimbaud and Verlaine to join them.

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American classics among most ‘challenged’ books of the decade in US

Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird among works protesters have tried to get removed from schools and libraries

Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Harper Lee might be three of America’s most beloved authors, but they have all made it on to a list of the country’s 100 most frequently banned and challenged books of the last decade.

Marking the start of Banned Books Week, the American Libraries Association (ALA) has reviewed all of the censorship reports it has received over the last 10 years to come up with the 100 books that readers and parents have most frequently tried to have removed from libraries and schools in the US.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Looking for Alaska by John Green

George by Alex Gino

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

Drama by Raina Telgemeier

Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James

Internet Girls (series) by Lauren Myracle

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Bone (series) by Jeff Smith

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss

Sex Is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg

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Donald Trump wanted daughter Ivanka to be running mate in 2016, book says

Ex-campaign deputy Rick Gates quotes Trump as saying: ‘Ivanka should be vice-president’ in book out in October

• US politics – live coverage
• Trump’s taxes: Ivanka named in New York Times report

Donald Trump wanted to name his daughter, Ivanka Trump, as his running mate in 2016, according to a new book by former campaign deputy Rick Gates, reported by Bloomberg News.

Related: New York Times publishes Donald Trump's tax returns in election bombshell

She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!

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Top authors hope you’ll give this book away to change young lives

Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane and 21 others give backing to literacy charity Room to Read in new anthology the Gifts of Reading

Books are some of the most powerful objects in existence – and, when they are given away to others, have an infinite capacity to change lives.

That is the central message of a new collection of deeply personal essays about the transformative power of giving, reading and receiving books, written by Robert Macfarlane, Philip Pullman, Roddy Doyle, Michael Ondaatje, Jan Morris and 18 other well-known authors to raise money for the global literacy charity Room to Read.

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Hilary Mantel: I am 'disappointed but freed' by Booker decision

Two-time winner, previously a favourite to win with the third novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, says books ‘surf on the tide of the times’

Two-time Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel has said that she is “disappointed” but “freed” after not making this year’s shortlist, congratulating the six authors now in competition for the £50,000 prize.

Mantel, who won the prize for the first two novels in her historical trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, had been tipped to win a third time for the final volume, The Mirror and the Light. But judges for this year’s prize instead selected four debuts, by Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor alongside new novels from Tsitsi Dangarembga and Maaza Mengiste. After announcing the lineup, judge and novelist Lee Child said The Mirror and the Light was “an absolutely wonderful novel, there’s no question about it”, but “as good as it was, there were some books which were better”.

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Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments

Five US senators have written to question plans to adapt The Three-Body Problem after its author voiced support for China’s mass internments in Xinjiang

Five Republican US senators have asked Netflix to reconsider its plans to adapt the bestselling Chinese author Liu Cixin’s book The Three-Body Problem, citing Liu’s comments in support of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighur Muslims.

In a letter to Netflix, the senators said they had “significant concerns with Netflix’s decision to do business with an individual who is parroting dangerous CCP propaganda”. The letter cites Liu’s interview with the New Yorker last year, in which the Chinese novelist was asked about the mass internment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Related: China has built 380 internment camps in Xinjiang, study finds

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Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments

Five US senators have written to question plans to adapt The Three-Body Problem after its author voiced support for China’s mass internments in Xinjiang

Five Republican US senators have asked Netflix to reconsider its plans to adapt the bestselling Chinese author Liu Cixin’s book The Three-Body Problem, citing Liu’s comments in support of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighur Muslims.

In a letter to Netflix, the senators said they had “significant concerns with Netflix’s decision to do business with an individual who is parroting dangerous CCP propaganda”. The letter cites Liu’s interview with the New Yorker last year, in which the Chinese novelist was asked about the mass internment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Related: China has built 380 internment camps in Xinjiang, study finds

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White House 'pressured official to say John Bolton book was security risk'

Ex-National Security Council official claims she was pressured her to say manuscript contained sensitive information after her department had cleared it

A former National Security Council official who while working there reviewed John Bolton’s memoir for classified information before publication, has claimed that White House lawyers tried to pressure her into signing misleading statements to prevent the publication ofthe book.

The allegations come a week after the US Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation into whether Bolton, the former national security adviser, mishandled classified information in his book, The Room Where It Happened. Highly critical of Trump, the book was a bestseller when it was published in June, selling 780,000 copies in its first week.

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‘Barefoot bookseller’ sought to run island bookshop in Maldives

Luxury resort says island is virtually Covid-free and wants a live-in book lover to provide guests with bespoke help for their ‘reading journeys’

For those in dismay at the prospect of wet, dark evenings and social isolation this autumn, a luxury desert island resort in the Maldives is looking for a live-in bookseller to start next month.

The eco resort of Soneva Fushi, on Kunfunadhoo Island in the Maldives, has played host to three “barefoot booksellers” since 2018: the most recent, Chrissy Ryan, left in April as the coronavirus pandemic swept the world. But with the Maldives reopening to international visitors, Soneva Fushi is now in need of a bookseller to run a smallshop on the private island, with the contract set to run from the end of October until after Easter.

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Elmer author David McKee: 'I've never been a prize winner'

The creator of the patchwork elephant and Mr Benn has won the BookTrust lifetime achievement award. He reflects on his career and explains why his best ideas come to him in the bath

David McKee, the author and illustrator who celebrates difference in his stories of the beloved patchwork elephant Elmer, has been named the 2020 recipient of children’s book charity BookTrust’s lifetime achievement award.

McKee, 85, joins a starry roster of former winners of the prize for outstanding contribution to children’s literature, from Shirley Hughes and Judith Kerr to Raymond Briggs, Helen Oxenbury and John Burningham.

I like to work for the adult that the child will be, and for the child that the adult still is

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'The great African novel of the 21st century': Namwali Serpell wins Arthur C Clarke award

The Old Drift takes prestigious science fiction award with what judges called ‘an extraordinary saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall’

Namwali Serpell has won the UK’s top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C Clarke award, for her first novel The Old Drift, which judges described as “stealth sci-fi”.

The Zambian author’s debut tells the stories of three families over three generations, moving from a colonial settlement by Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s as Zambia attempts to send a woman to the moon, and into the near future. A mix of historical fiction, magical realism and sci-fi, Serpell saw off competition from authors including previous winner Adrian Tchaikovsky and Hugo best novel winner Arkady Martine to take the prize. Originally established by the author Arthur C Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain, the award goes to the best sci-fi novel of the year.

Related: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell review – genre-blending Zambian debut

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'The great African novel of the 21st century': Namwali Serpell wins Arthur C Clarke award

The Old Drift takes prestigious science fiction award with what judges called ‘an extraordinary saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall’

Namwali Serpell has won the UK’s top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C Clarke award, for her first novel The Old Drift, which judges described as “stealth sci-fi”.

The Zambian author’s debut tells the stories of three families over three generations, moving from a colonial settlement by Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s as Zambia attempts to send a woman to the moon, and into the near future. A mix of historical fiction, magical realism and sci-fi, Serpell saw off competition from authors including previous winner Adrian Tchaikovsky and Hugo best novel winner Arkady Martine to take the prize. Originally established by the author Arthur C Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain, the award goes to the best sci-fi novel of the year.

Related: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell review – genre-blending Zambian debut

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Tintin artwork to be auctioned with estimate of €3m

Hergé’s original cover for The Blue Lotus is being auctioned 80 years after it was rejected for publication

The original Hergé cover for Tintin and the Blue Lotus is being auctioned with an estimated value of €3m (£2.75m), more than 80 years after it was rejected as too colourful and given to a seven-year-old boy as a keepsake.

The Belgian artist had been pleased with his drawing for the cover for his fifth album of the adventures of Tintin in 1936, only to be told it would be too expensive to mass produce due to the use of four colours in the drawing of his heroic young reporter facing a dragon.

Related: My favourite book as a kid – Tintin: The Shooting Star by Hergé

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JK Rowling's new thriller takes No 1 spot amid transphobia row

Troubled Blood, written as Robert Galbraith, has faced criticism for including a killer who dresses in women’s clothes, but has recorded strong first-week sales

JK Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller Troubled Blood sold almost 65,000 copies in just five days last week, amid widespread criticism of the author’s decision to include a serial killer who dresses in women’s clothing in the novel.

The latest Cormoran Strike novel, in which Rowling’s private detectives investigate the disappearance of a female GP decades earlier, was published last Tuesday. An early review in the Telegraph called one of the novel’s murder suspects, Dennis Creed, a “transvestite serial killer”, and asked “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”. This sparked further accusations of transphobia against the author, after her previous comments about trans people, with the hashtag #RIPJKRowling trending on Twitter and incitements to burn the novel. Rowling did not comment on the controversy around Creed, other than to say that he was loosely based on two real-life murderers.

Related: Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith review – a cosy blast from the past

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Sophia Loren returns to movies aged 86

Italian superstar plays a Holocaust survivor who befriends an orphan in Netflix film The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti

Sophia Loren is returning to cinema after an 11-year absence. Loren, 86, stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti.

In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.

Related: Sophia Loren: how Cary Grant begged me to become his lover

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Trump memo on Comey firing was 'tinfoil helmet material', Mueller prosecutor says

• Andrew Weissmann will publish memoir next week
• ‘You could almost feel the spittle coming off the paper,’ he writes

Donald Trump’s original draft statement justifying his firing of the former FBI director James Comey was “tinfoil helmet material”, according to a top prosecutor who worked for the special counsel Robert Mueller, and who in a new book calls the draft “excruciatingly juvenile, disorganized and brimming with spite, incoherent and narcissistic”.

Related: Mueller too timid in Trump-Russia investigation, top prosecutor claims

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Milan Kundera 'joyfully' accepts Czech Republic's Franz Kafka prize

Prestigious award follows the restoration of his citizenship last year after decades of exile in Paris

Milan Kundera, whose Czech citizenship was restored last year after he had spent more than 40 years in exile, has won one of the Czech Republic’s most prestigious literary awards, the Franz Kafka prize.

The $10,000 (£7,800) award, organised by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, is chosen by an international jury. Franz Kafka Society chairman Vladimír Železný said Kundera won for his “extraordinary contribution to Czech culture”, and for an “unmissable response” in European and world culture.

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Guess How Much I Love You author Sam McBratney dies aged 77

The Northern Irish author was best known for his story of Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare, which sold more than 43m copies

Sam McBratney, the author of the bestselling picture book Guess How Much I Love You, has died at the age of 77.

The Northern Irish author died on 18 September, his publisher Walker Books announced on Monday. A former teacher, McBratney was the author of more than 50 books and scripts, but was best known for Guess How Much I Love You, the story of Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare and their efforts to express their love for each other. First published in 1994, illustrated with Anita Jeram’s watercolours, the children’s classic has sold more than 43m copies worldwide, and been translated into 57 languages.

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HR McMaster was 'surprised and disappointed' at Trump claim Putin didn't interfere in election

Former national security adviser said he and others told Trump he was denying Russian meddling in 2016 ‘when we know it’s incontrovertible’

HR McMaster was not trying to save the world from Donald Trump when he became his second national security adviser, the retired general said in his first interview to promote his new book – if his second since leaving the White House.

“It was my duty to help the president come to his own decisions,” McMaster told CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday night, setting himself apart from other White House aides and a string of senior military figures, including former defense secretary James Mattis, who have publicly criticised the president.

Related: US warns Afghan women of increased risk of extremist attack

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Bernardine Evaristo: living as a lesbian made me stronger

Booker prize winner recalls angry decade as part of ‘counter-cultural, black womanist’ community

Bernadine Evaristo, the first black woman to win the Booker prize and a co-founder of Britain’s first black theatre company, has spoken of an angry, lesbian period she went through in the 1980s and of a decade spent living in a “black womanist” community.

Although she looks back on it now as “fun”, at the time she was “very angry as a woman”, she says.

The onus is always put on us, the people who have been shut out, to find a way in

Related: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo review – joy as well as struggle

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Gerald Durrell honoured with blue plaque at childhood home in London

My Family and Other Animals author’s Dulwich home is a long way from the Corfu of his books but was shared with a ferocious dog

Gerald Durrell is being memorialised with a blue plaque – but not amid the olive groves and sandy beaches of Corfu. Instead, a marker from English Heritage is being installed at the My Family and Other Animals author’s former family home in south London.

The plaque will mark Durrell’s first permanent home in England: 43 Alleyn Park in Dulwich. Durrell, who was born in India in 1925, moved to England in 1928 with his mother after his father’s death. The family lived in Dulwich for two years, “sheltering behind a grim, dropping, choking laurel hedge”, as Durrell put it, according to Michael Haag’s book The Durrells of Corfu.

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Talegate? Appledore beats Covid to keep book festival alive

Event organisers think outside the box to hold drive-in literary event in North Devon field

• Coronavirus – latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage

The book lovers of Appledore, a picturesque fishing village on the north Devon coast, are a resourceful, determined lot.

When their library faced closure 14 years ago, they helped save it by launching a literary festival, which grew and developed year by year into one of the most popular cultural events in the south-west of England.

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Rare books stolen in London heist found under floor in Romania

Recovery, including Newton and Galileo first editions, follows three-year search after Mission Impossible-style raid

Rare books worth more than £2.5m that were stolen from a warehouse in west London in a daring Mission Impossible-style heist have been found buried under the floor of a house in rural Romania.

The recovery of the 200 books, which include first editions of significant works by Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, is the culmination of a three-year police operation that involved raids on 45 addresses across three countries and led to charges against 13 people.

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Missing voices: guide to female philosophers counters absence in textbooks

The Philosopher Queens highlights thinkers from Hypatia to Hannah Arendt who the authors say are missing in most accounts of the subject

Two philosophy graduates are bringing out a book celebrating history’s unsung female philosophers, after realising that most textbooks and guides they found on the subject didn’t include a single woman.

Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting came up with the idea for The Philosopher Queens while searching for a book about history’s greatest female thinkers.

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JK Rowling says villain who wears women's clothes is based on real cases

The author’s new Robert Galbraith novel, Troubled Blood, has faced accusations of transphobia

JK Rowling has said that the character of Dennis Creed, the serial killer in her new novel who has provoked accusations of transphobia because he dresses up in a woman’s coat and wig, is loosely based on two real-life murderers.

Troubled Blood, in which private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott investigate the case of a female GP who disappeared decades earlier, was published earlier this week by Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith. A review in the Telegraph prompted widespread attacks on the author, including a Twitter hashtag #RIPJKRowling, after it described one of the possible suspects in the disappearance of the GP, Dennis Creed, as a “transvestite serial killer”, asking “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”. Others hit back, with Nick Cohen suggesting the Telegraph review misrepresented a novel in which “transvestism barely features”.

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Barack Obama to release first memoir weeks after US election

Former president’s highly anticipated book, A Promised Land, is due on 17 November

The first of two volumes of Barack Obama’s memoirs will be published worldwide on 17 November, two weeks after the US election, his publisher Penguin Random House has announced.

The publisher described the first volume, which will be issued in 25 languages, as covering the story of “his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world”. It indicated that it will cover his ascendency to being the first Black US president, and his first term in office.

There’s no feeling like finishing a book, and I’m proud of this one. In A Promised Land, I try to provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody. pic.twitter.com/T1QSZVDvOm

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Story of ‘bloodthirsty unicorns’ brings debut author record publishing deal

Annabel Steadman’s fantasy series Skandar and the Unicorn Thief has won a seven-figure book contract, with film rights also sold to Sony Pictures

A 28-year-old first-time author from Canterbury has landed what is believed to be the world’s largest ever book advance for a debut children’s writer, with a fantasy series about “bloodthirsty unicorns”.

Annabel Steadman, writing as AF Steadman, was paid a “major” seven-figure sum by Simon & Schuster this week, following a hotly contested multi-publisher auction for three books in her fantasy adventure series for children, Skandar and the Unicorn Thief. Set in a world where unicorns are deadly, and can only be tamed by the rider who hatches them, the series follows Skandar Smith, who is preparing to become a unicorn rider. When the most powerful unicorn in the world is stolen by a mysterious figure, becoming a rider becomes a lot more complicated than Skandar ancitipated.

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The Beatles announce Get Back, first official book in 20 years

Hanif Kureishi writes introduction to book edited from 120 hours of conversations from the Let It Be sessions, in tandem with Peter Jackson documentary

The first official Beatles book since seminal Anthology in 2000 is to be published in August 2021.

The Beatles: Get Back will tell the story of the final Beatles album, Let It Be, drawn from over 120 hours of transcribed conversations from the band’s studio sessions. It will accompany Peter Jackson’s feature documentary of the same name, also set for release that month.

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UK needs a museum of colonialism, says historian William Dalrymple

White Mughals author, speaking at the Jaipur literature festival, says it is ‘not a matter of being woke’ and children should learn about imperial history

Britain should set up a “museum of colonialism” where children will be able to learn about “the really terrible things that happened in our past”, the historian William Dalrymple has said.

Dalrymple, speaking in the final debate at the Jaipur literature festival (JLF) on whether statues in Britain of former imperial heroes who would now be seen as war criminals should be placed in a museum of colonialism, or stay where they are, said that while he “certainly wouldn’t want to see most of the nation’s statues torn down”, people “have to use discrimination”. The debate followed the toppling of the statue of the slaver Edward Colston in Bristol in June.

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Donald Trump claims to have found Bob Woodward book Rage 'very boring'

• President says he read the highly critical 392-page book
• Ex-aide said Trump struggles to read a one-page memo
• Rage: will Woodward’s tapes bring down Trump?

Donald Trump has claimed to have read Rage, the new book about his administration by Bob Woodward, in one evening, and to have found it “very boring”.

Related: Woodward: Trump raged when told Israel-UAE deal wouldn't make book

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Most diverse Booker prize shortlist ever as Hilary Mantel misses out

With no room for Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, the six finalists also include four debuts

• Judging the Booker prize: ‘These books are about living under intense pressure’

Hilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year’s shortlist.

With four writers of colour among its six authors, the shortlist, announced on Tuesday, is the most diverse line-up in the prize’s history. Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award.

Related: Booker nominee Avni Doshi: 'Women feared my ambivalence towards motherhood'

Related: Judging the Booker prize: 'These books are about living under intense pressure'

Guardian Live will host an online event with the six shortlisted authors on Wednesday 11 November.

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'Men still say women aren't funny': Nina Stibbe wins Comedy women in print prize

Reasons to Be Cheerful wins award set up to correct ‘sexist imbalance’ in Wodehouse prize, having also won that honour in 2019

Nina Stibbe has won the Comedy women in print prize for her novel about a teenage dental assistant clawing her way to adulthood in 1980s Leicester, Reasons to Be Cheerful.

Stibbe, author of the bestselling memoir Love, Nina, has “an instinctive comedic touch”, said chair of judges Marian Keyes. Stibbe’s third autobiographical novel following young Lizzie Vogel, Reasons to Be Cheerful beat titles including Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson to the £3,000 prize. Candice Carty-Williams was named runner-up for her debut novel Queenie, about a young black woman in London, winning £1,000.

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Publisher denounces Jessica Krug for pretending to be black

Duke University Press says all proceeds from Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities will go to support black and Latinx scholars

The publisher of Jessica Krug, the white academic who revealed she had pretended to be black for years, says she is “sickened, angered, and saddened” and that all proceeds from Krug’s book will go to a fund supporting black and Latinx scholars.

Krug, a white Jewish woman from Kansas and professor focusing on imperialism, colonialism and African American history at George Washington University, admitted in a Medium post earlier this month that she had “assumed identities within a blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US-rooted blackness, then Caribbean-rooted Bronx blackness”. After the university cancelled classes taught by Krug, and her colleagues called on her to step down, Krug resigned from her position last week .

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Woodward: Trump raged when told Israel-UAE deal wouldn't make book

Author says president’s tweet declaring the book ‘fake’ followed conversation in which he warned: ‘It’s a tough book’

• Rage: will Woodward’s tapes bring down Trump?

Donald Trump asked Bob Woodward to include the deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates in his book Rage, the author said on Sunday night – and when told that was not possible, tweeted that the book was “gonna be fake”.

Related: Trump aides insist Woodward tapes reveal strong leadership on Covid

Related: Woodward tells how allies tried to rein in 'childish' Trump's foreign policy

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Margaret Atwood wins Dayton literary peace prize

Handmaid’s Tale author honoured for reminding readers that ‘anything can happen anywhere given the right circumstances’

Margaret Atwood, whose sweeping body of work includes The Handmaid’s Tale, a depiction of a nightmarish totalitarian future for the US, has won a lifetime achievement award that celebrates literature’s power to foster peace, social justice and global understanding.

The Canadian writer will receive the Richard C Holbrooke distinguished achievement award, officials of the Dayton literary peace prize officials announced on Monday. The award is named for the late American diplomat who brokered the 1995 Bosnian peace accords reached in the Ohio city.

Related: Margaret Atwood: ‘If you’re going to speak truth to power, make sure it’s the truth’

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Trump ‘compromised by the Russians’, says former member of Mueller’s team

Peter Strzok was removed from Russia investigation and fired by the FBI over text messages critical of Trump

• Rage: Will Bob Woodward’s tapes bring down Donald Trump?

Donald Trump is “compromised by the Russians”, a former member of Robert Mueller’s investigation insisted on Sunday, contending that the president is “incapable of placing the national interest ahead of his own”.

Related: Trump attacks Robert Mueller's 'hit squad' in row over 'wiped' phones

Related: US Senate report goes beyond Mueller to lay bare Trump campaign's Russia links

Related: Roger Stone to Donald Trump: bring in martial law if you lose election

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Trump aides insist Woodward tapes reveal strong leadership on Covid

• President on tape: ‘I wanted to always play it down’
• Republican chair: ‘History will look back on him well’
• Rage: Will Bob Woodward’s tapes bring down Donald Trump?

The revelation that Donald Trump deliberately downplayed the coronavirus pandemic forced key aides on to desperate defence on Sunday, barely 50 days from the presidential election.

Related: Roger Stone to Donald Trump: bring in martial law if you lose election

I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t like to create a panic

The president was calm and steady in a time of unrest and uncertainty. And I think history will look back on him well

Related: Mike Bloomberg will spend $100m to help Biden beat Trump in Florida

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'Let me in – let me in!' Wuthering Heights house for sale at £1m

Ponden Hall, thought to have inspired the famous ghost scene in Emily Brontë’s novel, is on the market

A scratching on a window pane, the fingers of a small ice-cold hand, a melancholy voice begging to be let in. The appearance of Cathy’s ghost at the start of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is familiar to millions of readers and devotees of the 19th-century literary sisters. Now the house that is believed to have inspired the scene at the window is up for sale, although enthusiasts will need to find £1m for this piece of Brontë heritage.

The owners of Ponden Hall – a Grade II* listed property in Stanbury, near Haworth in West Yorkshire, and a thriving B&B – are retiring and downsizing more than 20 years after taking on the then-dilapidated house and carefully restoring it. The hall was owned by the Heaton family, who were trustees of Haworth parish church where Patrick Brontë, the sisters’ father, became vicar in 1820.

Ponden Hall is an incredibly atmospheric house, and if it wasn’t the model for Wuthering Heights, it should have been

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Shakespearean sisterhood: Maggie O'Farrell on Hamnet

The Women’s prize for fiction winner discusses plague and avenging Anne Hathaway

In the run-up to publication of her novel Hamnet at the end of March, Maggie O’Farrell bought herself a vintage dress. “There was going to be a party and a book tour and I thought I’d wear it to the launch,” she says. “I remember waking up that morning and seeing that Covid had reached Italy. I took it to the dry-cleaners and, five days later when I went to collect it, everything had been cancelled. It was a very weird and rapid turnaround.”

There were no party frocks this week either, when O’Farrell overtook five other writers – including Booker laureates Hilary Mantel and Bernardine Evaristo – to become the 25th winner of the Women’s prize for fiction. “I was totally gobsmacked. There wasn’t an atom of me that wasn’t surprised,” says the 48-year-old author from her home in Edinburgh, where she has spent much of the year locked down with her novelist husband William Sutcliffe and their three children.

Related: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell review – immersive Shakespearean drama

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'We haven't seen anything like it since Harry Potter': UK bookshops report record week

With books delayed by the pandemic reaching shops alongside other titles aimed at the Christmas market, the trade has seen sales boom

Booksellers up and down the UK are reporting a boom in sales since readers returned to bookshops after the lockdown, with the first avalanche of Christmas titles giving them their best first week of September since records began.

New books from authors including Richard Osman, Elena Ferrante and Raynor Winn helped last week, with 590 hardbacks published on 3 September, dubbed “Super Thursday”. Many of the bestselling titles had been delayed from earlier in the year due to the coronavirus. Trade magazine the Bookseller said it was the best first week of September on record, with the books market making £33.6m over the week to 5 September, an increase of 11.1% on the previous seven days.

Related: ‘We’re so nervous': England’s bookshops prepare to reopen on Monday

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JG Ballard:'science fiction celebrates the possibilities of life' – archive, 11 September 1970

11 September 1970: Ballard discusses his new book The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as a recent exhibition of crashed cars

JG Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930; for the last ten years he has lived with his daughters (he is a widower) in a rundown semi in Shepperton, with books and papers scattered around as though he is on the point of moving out. The rootlessness gives his writing an edge, a quality of observation, a feel for environment that is of contemporary fiction. He himself does not think of it so much as being rootless as being slightly out of step:

“When you think of the writers with roots I suppose you can take the great Russian novelists though I don’t know in fact how rooted in their own societies and their own time and their own landscape they really were. I get the impression Dostoevsky was a pretty edgy character. And as for Tolstoy you get the impression that he thought Earth was a pretty poor stopping place on the way to heaven. If you think of English writers writing now, without being catty or naming names, those who are the most closely wedded to England strike me as those who are weakest of all.”

Related: JG Ballard: five years on – a celebration

Related: The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963

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Five key revelations in Bob Woodward’s Trump book, from Covid to Kim 'love letters'

Rage, based on 18 interviews with the president, shows Trump implicating himself, such as downplaying the Covid threat

Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Rage, spurred extensive uproar following Washington Post and CNN reports Wednesday on some of the famed investigative journalist’s bombshell claims.

Related: Bob Woodward rejects criticism that he sat on Trump 'deadly' virus remarks

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Dara McAnulty becomes youngest ever finalist for Baillie Gifford prize

Diary of a Young Naturalist, the 16-year-old’s debut, joins 12 other books in contention for prestigious £50,000 nonfiction award

The teenager Dara McAnulty has become the youngest writer ever to be longlisted for the UK’s most prestigious nonfiction award, the Baillie Gifford prize, for his book Diary of a Young Naturalist, which he began writing at the age of 14.

The book chronicles a year in the life of McAnulty, who is autistic, as he deals with his family’s move across Northern Ireland and seeks sanctuary in nature, detailing encounters in his garden and in the wild.

Related: Natural talent: the 16 year-old writer taking the world by storm

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Trump knew Covid was deadly but wanted to ‘play it down’, Woodward book says

US president gave Bob Woodward 18 interviews, forming basis of new book Rage, and said of virus: ‘This is deadly stuff’

Donald Trump knew the extent of the deadly coronavirus threat in February but intentionally misled the public by deciding to “play it down”, according to interviews recorded by one of America’s most venerated investigative journalists.

The US president gave Bob Woodward 18 interviews between December 2019 and July 2020. They form the basis of his revelatory new book, Rage, obtained on Wednesday by the Washington Post and CNN, in which Trump is condemned by his own words.

Related: Trump 'wanted to play down' Covid despite knowing deadliness, Bob Woodward book says – live

Related: 'Our democracy is deeply imperiled': how democratic norms are under threat ahead of the US election

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Maggie O'Farrell wins Women's prize for fiction with 'exceptional' Hamnet

Study of grief over the death of Shakespeare’s young son from bubonic plague acclaimed by judges as a truly great novel

• Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Having to bury a child must be unlike anything else’

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, set in an England stalked by a plague that kills the young son of William Shakespeare, has won the Women’s prize for fiction.

A study of bereavement, O’Farrell’s eighth novel opens with the death of the 11-year-old boy, and delves into the relationship between Hamnet’s mother, Agnes, and her famous playwright husband.

Related: Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Having to bury a child must be unlike anything else’

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Sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty wins Wainwright prize for nature writing

Diary of a Young Naturalist hailed as ‘astute and candid’ by judges, who call for the book to be added to national curriculum

• Interview: Natural talent: the 16-year-old writer taking the world by storm
  

Dara McAnulty, a 16-year-old secondary-school student from Northern Ireland, has seen off competition from established writers to win the Wainwright prize for nature writing, for his debut Diary of a Young Naturalist.

McAnulty started his wildlife blog, Young Fermanagh Naturalist, when he was 12. He started writing Diary of a Young Naturalist at 14, documenting the year from spring equinox to spring equinox, from his 14th to 15th birthday. In it, he recounts his life as his family moves across Northern Ireland, transporting him away from his beloved local forest, changing schools and dealing with bullying. McAnulty, who is autistic along with his two siblings and his mother, seeks sanctuary in nature as he juggles school, friendships and environmental campaigning.

Related: Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty review - miraculous memoir

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Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé: the 21-year-old British student with a million-dollar book deal

Author says she was ‘just a broke student writing to make myself some fictional friends’ in her debut Ace of Spades, about two black students navigating racism at an elite school

A 21-year-old British university student has landed a million-dollar book deal in the US for her first novel, a high-school thriller that tackles institutionalised racism.

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, from London, was 19 and studying English, Chinese and anthropology in Aberdeen when she began writing what would become Ace of Spades. The young adult novel, which follows two black students trying to find out who is spreading damaging rumours about them at their elite private school, was snapped up this week, along with a second novel, by Macmillan in the US for a seven-figure sum. It will be published next June.

Often in publishing, a lot of black authors don’t get the support so it was just so lovely to see them not lowball me

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French book I Hate Men sees sales boom after government adviser calls for ban

Ralph Zurmély, who advises the gender equality ministry, says Pauline Harmange’s ‘ode to misandry’ should be withdrawn for inciting hatred

A French government official’s attempts to ban an essay entitled I Hate Men over its “incitement to hatred on the grounds of gender” have backfired, sending sales of the feminist pamphlet skyrocketing.

Pauline Harmange’s Moi les hommes, je les déteste explores whether women “have good reason to hate men”, and whether “anger towards men is actually a joyful and emancipatory path, if it is allowed to be expressed”. Its small French publisher, Monstrograph, called it a “feminist and iconoclastic book” that “defends misandry as a way of making room for sisterhood”.

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Michael Cohen releases book with claims about Trump's racism and toxic family dynamic

Trump’s former lawyer publishes memoir Disloyal, prompting White House statement calling him a liar

Michael Cohen published his memoir of his time as Donald Trump’s fixer on Tuesday, greeted by a White House statement calling him a “disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer”, and a liar.

Related: Trump told Sarah Sanders to 'take one for the team' after Kim Jong-un wink

“Donald Trump will do anything and everything within which to win. And I believe that includes manipulating the ballots,” Michael Cohen tells @LesterHoltNBC. pic.twitter.com/XtRjGivvKO

Related: US veterans and soldiers divided over Trump calling war dead ‘suckers’

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Regina King makes history at Venice film festival with One Night in Miami

King’s directorial debut is the first film directed by an African-American woman to be selected in the festival’s history

Regina King’s directorial debut stood out at this year’s Venice film festival. There’s the intriguing subject matter: it’s an adaptation of Kemp Powers’s dramatisation of a real-life meeting between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke after Clay’s surprise win over Sonny Liston in February 1964. But there’s another reason: it’s the first film directed by an African-American woman to be selected in the festival’s history.

At the event on Monday, King recognised that the success or failure of her film, One Night in Miami, could have ramifications for other black female directors. “It’s interesting because how this film performs will open doors or maybe close doors for more black female directors … that’s how things seem to work,” she said over video link.

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TS Eliot estate steps in to help Brontë Parsonage Museum rescue appeal

A £20,000 donation has been made on behalf of the late poet to help preserve the historic home of the sibling novelists

The estate of TS Eliot has stepped in to shore up the Brontë Parsonage with a £20,000 donation, after the historic building where the Brontë children were raised warned that it was at risk of closure due to the coronavirus.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum in the village of Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the young Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell would act out plays and where the novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written, said that its closure during lockdown had had a devastating financial impact, with a loss of expected income of more than £500,000.

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The best recent science fiction and fantasy – review roundup

The Mother Code by Carole Stivers; A Girl Made of Air by Nydia Hetherington; The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart; The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix; and Augury by SE Lister

Carole Stivers’s first novel was originally slated for British publication in May, but postponed because of the lockdown. The Mother Code (Hodder & Stoughton, £20.99) was written well before the current pandemic and yet couldn’t be more timely. After a botched mission by the US military to defeat terrorists with bioweapons, the world is ravaged by an inexorable viral plague. In a bid to save the human race, scientists develop genetically altered children immune to the virus and nurtured by robot AIs known as Mothers. The novel shuttles back and forth in time between the story of the scientists racing against the clock to develop the AIs while the plague devastates civilisation, and the children who are programmed with the Mother Code – a self-awareness with far-reaching and poignant consequences. After some early info-dumping, and characters relaying what they already know for the benefit of the reader, Stivers delivers a gripping techno-thriller which offers hope despite its bleak premise.

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Tom Gauld on the possibilities of sci-fi – cartoon

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David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59

The anarchist and author of bestselling books on capitalism and bureaucracy died in a Venice hospital on Wednesday

David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist author of bestselling books on bureaucracy and economics including Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has died aged 59.

On Thursday Graeber’s wife, the artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky, announced on Twitter that Graeber had died in hospital in Venice the previous day. In a statement, Graeber’s publisher, Penguin Random House, said that the cause of death was not yet known.

Related: Caring too much. That's the curse of the working classes | David Graeber

Related: David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’

Related: Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria? | David Graeber

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Oedipus vex: French philosopher disowns son over novel

Jean-Paul Enthoven forgave Raphaël for going out with one-time girlfriend Carla Bruni but autobiographical book too much

Is it possible to know anything, philosophers have pondered for centuries? In the case of two heavyweight French thinkers, the question is more: is it possible to know too much?

A respected French philosopher has publicly disowned his equally famous philosopher son not for stealing his girlfriend but for writing a book he claims has left him “heartbroken” and loved ones “drowning in a sea of ingratitude”.

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Biggest books of autumn 2020: what to read in a very busy year

From a secret diary, gossipy celebrity memoirs and a love letter to Jürgen Klopp, to novels by Don DeLillo, Elena Ferrante and Nick Hornby - new releases to look out for

This autumn will be like no other in the world of books. It’s always a busy season, but Covid-19 postponements mean that in September alone, 16,443 titles will be published in the UK (including ebooks and audio): 76% of these are nonfiction. Publishers are worried that much will get lost, but one of the surefire hits is Caitlin Moran’s memoir More Than a Woman (Ebury). Coming a decade after the mega-selling How to Be a Woman, this mid-life book follows, with Moran’s irresistible comic candour, a day in the life of a woman in her early 40s as she deals with ageing parents, divorcing friends, teenagers having “micro-breakdowns”, greying hair, “maintenance shags” and the tyranny of the to-do list. Other writers have covered this ground, but very few are as funny.

Related: Alan Davies: 'I've become a huge enemy of silence and secrecy'

Swire has been keeping a secret diary of life as a political plus-one, with lots of details of mansplaining

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Top 10 books about space travel | Samantha Cristoforetti

The Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti chooses her favourite extraterrestrial reading, taking in fiction by Italo Calvino and Stanisław Lem alongside reportage and history

One of the funny little things I noticed after having lived in space for a while is that, contrary to everyday experience on Earth, it took some effort to keep my arms pressed against my body. Had I remembered better my childhood reading, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Jules Verne imagined this back in 1865. At one point, the protagonists of his From the Earth to the Moon realise that “their bodies were absolutely without weight. Their arms, full extended, no longer sought their sides.”

That wasn’t the first time literature imagined a trip to the moon: in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), the knight Astolfo flies to the moon in search of Orlando’s lost wits. Cyrano de Bergerac’s satirical novel The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon dates back to the 17th century, and in 1857 Italian astronomer Ernest Capocci wrote a novel about the first journey to the moon, which he imagined undertaken in 2057 by a woman named Urania. Yet Verne was the first to narrate the endeavour with some measure of engineering credibility, eventually coming to be recognised as one of the fathers of science fiction.

Related: Top 10 books about remaking the future | Peter F Hamilton

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Trump told Sarah Sanders to 'take one for the team' after Kim Jong-un wink

• Ex-press secretary describes boorish remarks in new memoir
• ‘Kim Jong-un hit on you,’ Trump said, after gesture at summit

Donald Trump told Sarah Sanders she would have to “go to North Korea and take one for the team”, after Kim Jong-un winked at the then White House press secretary during a summit in Singapore in June 2018.

Related: Trump denies 'series of mini-strokes' after book reports mystery hospital visit

Related: Melania & Me: Ivanka Trump sought to undermine first lady, new book says

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Game of Thrones creators to bring Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy to Netflix

David Benioff and DB Weiss to adapt The Three-Body Problem and two sequels with Alexander Woo

Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and DB Weiss are to adapt a series of hit science fiction novels by Chinese author Liu Cixin for Netflix. Together with Alexander Woo, who has worked on television series including True Blood, Benioff and Weiss’s first project in a reported $200m (£164m) deal with the streaming giant will see the showrunners bring The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels – known as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy – to television.

Netflix’s Peter Friedlander described the books as having “changed what science fiction meant to me for ever”, saying: “[Cixin’s] ability to interweave science with fiction made his vision of the future and extraterrestrial contact feel more realistic than any other science fiction I’ve read. I was also drawn in by the story of all of humanity [being] vulnerable to the same external threat and how this both unifies and divides humans.”

Related: Game of Thrones creators ditch HBO for Netflix in big-money deal

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Edinburgh international festival's online events draw more than 1m views

There were 26 specially staged opera, classical and ballet performances after the cancellation of live concerts

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The Edinburgh international festival’s online opera, classical and ballet performances were viewed more a million times last month, after its live concerts were cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The festival said its 26 digital productions, which featured specially staged performances involving about 500 artists, musicians and technical staff, were watched in nearly 50 countries worldwide. Last year, its live shows in Edinburgh had an audience of 420,000.

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Game of Thrones creators to bring Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy to Netflix

David Benioff and DB Weiss to adapt The Three-Body Problem and two sequels with Alexander Woo

Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and DB Weiss are to adapt a series of hit science fiction novels by Chinese author Liu Cixin for Netflix. Together with Alexander Woo, who has worked on television series including True Blood, Benioff and Weiss’s first project in a reported $200m (£164m) deal with the streaming giant will see the showrunners bring The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels – known as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy – to television.

Netflix’s Peter Friedlander described the books as having “changed what science fiction meant to me for ever”, saying: “[Cixin’s] ability to interweave science with fiction made his vision of the future and extraterrestrial contact feel more realistic than any other science fiction I’ve read. I was also drawn in by the story of all of humanity [being] vulnerable to the same external threat and how this both unifies and divides humans.”

Related: Game of Thrones creators ditch HBO for Netflix in big-money deal

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Dictionary.com revises definitions to eliminate prejudiced language

Leading online reference announces more than 15,000 changes, intended to foreground people over clinical language

Dictionary.com is making major changes to more than 15,000 of its definitions, from capitalising Black to updating entries about sexual orientation, aiming to foreground people over “clinical language”.

On Tuesday the website, which with 70m monthly users describes itself as the world’s leading digital dictionary, released what it called its largest ever update.

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