L’anomalie secures country’s leading books prize, which was delayed this year in solidarity with bookshops forced to close by lockdown
France’s oldest and most celebrated literary award the Prix Goncourt has been awarded to novelist Hervé Le Tellier, a trained mathematician and former scientific journalist.
Related: 'There is a thirst for writers of mixed heritage': what is France reading?
Continue reading...Amitav Ghosh, Margaret Atwood and Emma Thompson are among 20 activists and cultural figures to speak at Writers Rebel event
Writers and activists including Emma Thompson, Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh are to speak about their favourite endangered animals as part of a remembrance day for lost species.
The snow leopard, pangolin and vaquita porpoise are among the endangered animals that will be championed by participants at the free online event, On the Brink, organised by Writers Rebel, which is part of Extinction Rebellion.
The sixth mass extinction in geological history has not only begun but is accelerating, according to some scientists, who warn that it may be a tipping point for the collapse of civilisation.
Continue reading...Letter signed by 100 people including Stephen Fry, Sir Mark Rylance and Ali Smith points out freedom to roam only extends to 8% of country
More than 100 authors, musicians, actors and artists have written to Boris Johnson urging him to extend the public’s right to roam over the English countryside.
The letter, signed by leading figures from Stephen Fry to Jarvis Cocker, Sir Mark Rylance to Ali Smith, calls on the prime minister to give people greater access to nature to improve the public’s physical and mental health.
Continue reading...Eminent group adds pens of Andrea Levy and Jean Rhys to its collection as it sets out to champion writers of colour
The late Andrea Levy, author of the award-winning Windrush novel Small Island, is to become the first writer of colour to have her pen join the Royal Society of Literature’s historic collection, which includes pens belonging to George Eliot and Lord Byron.
The eminent society, which was founded in 1820, periodically appoints new fellows deemed to have published works of “outstanding literary merit”. Fellows are then invited to sign their names in the society’s roll book, using the pen of a “historically influential” UK writer – either Charles Dickens (although his pen was retired in 2013), TS Eliot, Byron or George Eliot. Now, as the RSL sets out to champion the writers of colour with a series of new appointments and initiatives, it has added Levy to this list, alongside Wide Sargasso Sea author Jean Rhys.
Excellence is a constant project which needs updating. We can’t just judge everything by the criteria of George Eliot and TS Eliot
Related: Andrea Levy remembered by Bill Mayblin
Continue reading...Author dressed up as Professor Challenger, whom he preferred over his Sherlock creation
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, the fictional scientist and explorer who discovers a forgotten land of dinosaurs, went on to inspire a string of adventure films, including Jurassic Park. He was a headstrong and irascible antihero, but there is now proof he also served as his creator’s literary alter ego.
The evidence of handwritten notes and amendments, laid out this week with the first publication of the full manuscript of Conan Doyle’s original and most famous Challenger story, The Lost World, show the author not only posed for a photograph of himself dressed as the professor, but also initially gave the character his own age and address.
Continue reading...Anthropological study of metaphor takes 2020 Diagram prize, pulling ahead of Introducing the Medieval Ass in public vote
A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path has beaten Introducing the Medieval Ass to win the Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year.
Both books are academic studies, with the winning title by University of Alberta anthropologist Gregory Forth. It sees Forth look at how the Nage, an indigenous people primarily living on the islands of Flores and Timor, understand metaphor, and use their knowledge of animals to shape specific expressions. The title itself is an idiom for someone who begins a task but is then distracted by other matters.
Continue reading...More than 12,000 authors had protested that Amazon’s audiobook arm was deducting writers’ royalties when users return titles
Audible has changed, but not reversed, a controversial policy that allowed listeners to return or exchange audiobooks, with the cost deducted from writers’ royalties rather than absorbed by the Amazon-owned company, after thousands of authors protested.
A letter signed by 12,228 authors and backed by major organisations including the US’s Authors Guild and the UK’s Society of Authors, expressed concerns over Audible’s “easy exchange” policy, which allowed subscribers to return or exchange an audiobook within 365 days of purchasing it, with the money then deducted from the writers’ royalties.
Continue reading...Danish Bond star Mikkelsen to take over the role of dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald in the third Harry Potter prequel
Warner Bros Pictures has confirmed James Bond star Mads Mikkelsen will take over the role of dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald from Johnny Depp in the third Fantastic Beasts film.
Depp stepped down from the role after losing his high-profile libel case against the Sun newspaper over an article that labelled him a “wife beater”.
Continue reading...Abrams, who is a romance author along with her political work, has joined the ‘romancing the runoff’ fundraiser
Rallying behind Stacey Abrams, the Democratic politician, voting rights activist and romance author, American romance novelists have helped raise nearly $400,000 to help elect two Democratic senators in Georgia.
Now, Abrams herself has joined the “Romancing the Runoff” fundraiser, and has donated a copy of the first of her eight published romance novels--one signed with both her real name, and her pen name, Selena Montgomery.
Thank you @RomancingRunoff for your amazing efforts. I’m privileged to be one of you. For the cause, I’d like to throw in an autographed copy of my first novel, Rules of Engagement, in the rare hardback version. Both Selena & Stacey will sign. https://t.co/32aiezmJmW
Related: Stacey Abrams: Georgia's political heroine … and romance author
Continue reading...German media firm, already owner of the giant Penguin Random House, says acquisition of another major publisher is ‘approvable’ within monopoly rules
German media group Bertelsmann is set to acquire publisher Simon & Schuster for $2.17bn, less than a year after it took control of Penguin Random House (PRH).
Bertelsmann outbid Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns publisher HarperCollins, in a contest for the company that is home to Dan Brown, Hillary Clinton and Stephen King. ViacomCBS put the company up for sale this year in order to refocus on its online and advertising operations.
Continue reading...Penguin Random House Canada’s plans to publish a new work by the ‘professor against political correctness’ has reportedly prompted numerous complaints
The announcement of a new book from Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, the self-styled “professor against political correctness”, has prompted dozens of complaints from staff at his publisher in Canada, according to a report.
Vice’s story on Tuesday said that the announcement of Peterson’s forthcoming Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, a follow-up to his global bestseller 12 Rules for Life, prompted “several” staff at Penguin Random House Canada (PRH Canada) to confront management. Peterson’s views on subjects including transgender rights, gender and race have been controversial. Last year, Cambridge University rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to Peterson following criticism from faculty and students. Also in 2019, 12 Rules for Life was temporarily pulled from sale in a New Zealand book chain after the terrorist attack on a Christchurch mosque, over perceived links between Peterson’s fanbase and Islamophobia.
Related: Jordan Peterson: ‘The pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal’
Continue reading...The poet had been wrongly included among more than 300 figures whose collections were associated with wealth obtained from colonial violence
The British Library has apologised to Carol Hughes, the widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.
Hughes’s name had been included on a spreadsheet from the library detailing more than 300 figures with “evidence of connections to slavery, profits from slavery or from colonialism”. Hughes’s link was through Nicholas Ferrar, who was born in 1592 and whose family was, the library said, “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which was set up to colonise North America.
Continue reading...Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell author picked for Piranesi, alongside Denise Mina, Julian Barnes and the late Eavan Boland, in prizes for ‘enjoyable’ books
Sixteen years after she published her debut, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke has made the shortlist for the Costa book awards for her second novel, the long-awaited Piranesi.
The Costas recognise the “most enjoyable” books across five categories, with 708 books submitted this year. Piranesi, the fantastical story of a man who lives in a house in which an ocean is imprisoned, was described by the judges of the £5,000 Costa best novel award as “magnificently imagined”. Clarke, who was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome after publication of the bestselling fantasy Jonathan Strange, said she was “so pleased” to make the Costa lineup.
Related: Susanna Clarke: ‘I was cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness’
Related: ‘My mum was more than the woman shot by police’: read an extract from The Louder I Will Sing
Continue reading...Craig Brown wins prestigious award for nonfiction with book that judges say ‘has reinvented the art of biography’
Craig Brown has won the Baillie Gifford prize, the UK’s top award for nonfiction, for One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, a take on the band that judges said had “reinvented the art of biography”.
A mix of history, diaries, autobiography, fan letters, interviews, lists and charts, Brown’s book tells the story of the group and those within their orbit. Chair of judges Martha Kearney called it “a joyous, irreverent, insightful celebration of the Beatles, a highly original take on familiar territory”.
Related: Road trips, yoga and LSD with the dentist: what the Beatles did next
Related: One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown – review
Continue reading...Library staff believed manuscripts had been ‘mis-shelved’ in 2000
Two Charles Darwin manuscripts have been reported as stolen from Cambridge University library two decades after they were last seen.
Staff believed the precious items had been “mis-shelved” within the vast archives late in the year 2000 and the matter was not reported to Cambridgeshire police until 20 October this year. The force said it has launched an investigation and notified Interpol.
Continue reading...Instead, the dictionary says ‘a year that has left us speechless’ is best reflected by expanding its annual selection to a whole list
For the first time, the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen not to name a word of the year, describing 2020 as “a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word”. Instead, from “unmute” to “mail-in”, and from “coronavirus” to “lockdown”, the eminent reference work has announced its “words of an ‘unprecedented’ year”.
On Monday, the dictionary said that there were too many words to sum up the events of 2020. Tracking its vast corpus of more than 11bn words found in web-based news, blogs and other text sources, its lexicographers revealed what the dictionary described as “seismic shifts in language data and precipitous frequency rises in new coinage” over the past 12 months.
Continue reading...Georgian house where infamous French poets lodged was to become an arts centre – but its owner has had a change of heart
It was the London home of the 19th-century Decadent poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, two of France’s greatest literary heroes, whose tempestuous love affair ended with a shooting and prison. A Georgian building in Camden, where they rented lodgings in 1873, was to have become “a poetry house”, an arts and education centre in one of the capital’s most deprived areas, after a campaign involving some of Britain’s foremost arts figures.
But the arts charity behind the project has been dismayed to discover that Michael Corby, the benefactor who promised to bequeath the historic building to the charity a decade ago, has changed his mind without warning, deciding instead to sell it on the open market.
Continue reading...An injury set the England footballer on a mission to tackle inequalities he faced as a child
When Marcus Rashford injured his back after taking a heavy knock in Manchester United’s 1-0 FA Cup replay win against Wolverhampton in January, it was bad news for him and his club – but also the start of an incredible journey for the England striker.
The double stress fracture indicated he would be out of action for some time. Football had been his life, his routine, his discipline since joining the academy system at Manchester United at the age of seven.
Continue reading...The Diaries of Alan Rickman, written by the actor until his death with the intention of one day publishing them, will be released in autumn 2022
The diaries of the late actor Alan Rickman are to be published, with 27 handwritten volumes of his “witty, gossipy and utterly candid” thoughts about his career and life spanning more than 25 years set to be edited down into a single book.
Publisher Canongate has acquired the rights the actor’s diaries, which will be published as The Diaries of Alan Rickman in autumn 2022. Rickman began writing the diaries by hand in the early 1990s, with the intention that they would one day be published. By then, his acting career had truly kicked off, him having already built a reputation at the Royal Shakespeare Company and on stage as Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He was also a household name for his cinematic turns as the sardonic villain Hans Gruber in 1988’s Die Hard, the Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and as Juliet Stevenson’s dead husband in the 1991 supernatural romance Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Related: Alan Rickman – a life in pictures
Continue reading...List by pseudonymous author of beloved Neapolitan novels includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and several Italian classics
Elena Ferrante, the bestselling pseudonymous Italian author behind My Brilliant Friend, has named her favourite 40 books by female authors around the world, with Toni Morrison, Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith all making the cut.
The author, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels has sold 13m copies worldwide, has published her list on Bookshop.org, the online store that recently launched in the UK and gives a proportion of sales to independent booksellers. Ferrante’s UK publisher, Europa Editions, is returning their 10% sales commission from Ferrante’s list to Bookshop.org so it can be shared among the 300 independent bookshops that have signed up to the site so far.
Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘We don’t have to fear change, what is other shouldn’t frighten us'
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (Virago)
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Anonymous (Europa Editions)
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Philip Boehm (Penguin Classics)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (Picador)
Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Harper Perennial)
A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa)
Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated by Tina Kover (Europa Editions)
The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray (Harper Perennial)
The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer (Fitzcarraldo)
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Jenny McPhee (Daunts)
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (Windmill Books)
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (Vintage)
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Serpent’s Tail)
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Flamingo)
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing (Flamingo)
The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector, translated by Idra Novey (Penguin Classics)
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Fourth Estate)
Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Pushkin)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (Vintage Classics)
Dear Life by Alice Munro (Vintage)
The Bell by Iris Murdoch (Vintage Classics)
Accabadora by Michela Murgia, translated by Silvester Mazzarella (MacLehose Press)
Le Bal by Irene Nemirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith (Vintage)
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate)
The Love Object: Selected Stories by Edna O’Brien (Faber)
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (Faber)
Evening Descends Upon the Hills: Stories from Naples by Anna Maria Ortese, translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee (Pushkin)
Gilead by Marylinne Robinson (Virago)
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Harper Perennial)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Penguin)
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Simon & Schuster)
The Door by Magda Szabò, translated by Len Rix (Vintage Classics)
Cassandra by Christa Wolf, translated by Jan van Heurck (Daunts)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador)
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Grace Frick (Penguin Classics)
Continue reading...From her Everest scoop to her journey as a trans woman, the author’s authoritative voice and questioning mind found an eager audience
Jan Morris, the historian and travel writer who evoked time and place with the flair of a novelist, has died aged 94.
As a journalist Morris broke monumental news, including Hillary and Norgay’s ascent of Everest, and the French involvement in the Israeli attack on Egypt in the Suez war. As a bestselling author of more than 30 books, she was equally lauded for histories including Pax Britannica, her monumental account of the British Empire, and for her colourful accounts of places from Venice to Oxford, Hong Kong to Trieste. But she was also well-known as a transgender pioneer, with Conundrum, her account of the journey from man to woman, an international sensation when it was published in 1974.
Related: Jan Morris: ‘You’re talking to someone at the very end of things’
I should have been terrified, but I wasn't. It was inevitable – I'd been heading there mentally all my life
Continue reading...Recognition of 18th-century pioneer on London building is earliest for a black person
Ottobah Cugoano, an 18th-century anti-slavery campaigner who wrote the most radical abolitionist text of its time, has become the earliest black figure to receive a blue plaque.
The plaque on a building in Pall Mall, central London, aims to shine light on the remarkable and little-known story of a man described by the historian David Olusoga as a “true pioneer … the first African to demand the total abolition of slavery and one of the leaders of Georgian London’s black community.”
Continue reading...Scottish-American wins £50,000 for autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow
The Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the Booker prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, a story based on his own life that follows a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with a mother who is battling addiction.
Stuart, 44, has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late”. He is the second Scot to win the £50,000 award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said “changed his life” because it was the first time he saw “my people, my dialect, on the page”.
Related: Douglas Stuart's Booker win heralds the arrival of a fully formed voice | Justine Jordan
Continue reading...Alan Dean Foster claims media giant has not paid him royalties for his books after acquiring Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox
Disney has been accused of failing to pay royalties to the acclaimed author Alan Dean Foster for his bestselling novelisations of films including Star Wars and Alien, in a fight over copyright that is being described as unprecedented and grotesque.
Foster was approached by George Lucas to write a novelisation of Star Wars: A New Hope, which was published at the end of 1976, shortly before the film was released. Foster alleges that when Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, it bought the rights to the novel as well as the first Star Wars sequel novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, published in 1978. Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019 meant it also acquired the rights to Foster’s novelisations of Alien, Aliens and Alien 3. But the science-fiction author said Disney had not paid him royalties on the books, all of which are still in print and earning money for the media giant.
Continue reading...The Nature of Middle-earth will cover topics including Elvish immortality, the geography of Gondor – and which races could grow beards
A previously unpublished collection of writings by JRR Tolkien, exploring the world of Middle-earth in essays tackling topics ranging from Elvish reincarnation to which characters had beards, is to be published next summer.
Related: How Tolkien created Middle-earth
Continue reading...Yu, writer of short stories and television, won best fiction for Interior Chinatown, his inventive, ‘gut punch’ second novel
Charles Yu, a writer whose talents range from short stories to episodes of HBO’s Westworld, has won the National Book Award for fiction for Interior Chinatown.
The novel, his second after his 2010 debut How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, beat out A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, and Rumaan Alam’s dystopian Leave the World Behind (soon to be a Netflix thriller starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington) for the top fiction prize at the all-virtual awards ceremony hosted by the National Book Foundation.
Related: The Dead Are Arising by Les Payne and Tamara Payne review – the real Malcolm X
Continue reading...In its first day, the book sold nearly 890,000 copies in the US and Canada, beating sales of Michelle Obama’s Becoming
Barack Obama’s new book A Promised Land has sold nearly 890,000 copies in the US and Canada in its first 24 hours, putting it on track to become the best selling presidential memoir in modern history.
The first-day sales, which set a record for Penguin Random House, includes pre-orders, e-books and audio.
Related: A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – memoir of a president
Continue reading...Writing under a pseudonym, Cockcroft was most famous for the 1971 cult classic novel about a psychiatrist who lets chance decide his life
The author of the cult classic novel The Dice Man, in which a bored psychiatrist travels to some very dark places when he lets “the dice decide” his options, has died at the age of 87.
George Powers Cockcroft, who published The Dice Man in 1971 under the pseudonym Luke Rhinehart, died on 6 November, his publishers confirmed to the Guardian.
Related: Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel
Continue reading...Film director signs two-book deal, for novel of his 2019 film and a ‘deep dive’ into 1970s cinema
Quentin Tarantino is set to contribute to what the film director described as the “often marginalised, yet beloved sub-genre” of movie novelisations, after being signed to write a novel based on his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Related: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood review - Tarantino's dazzling LA redemption song
Continue reading...The prime minister and Dominic Cummings to feature in one-off edition BeanOLD
Boris and Dom may have gone their separate ways but their crazy antics live on, and this week they may finally get their comeuppance. Not yet in real life but in the Beano at least.
The 82-year-old comic will this week publish its first ever version aimed at grownups with a story that revolves around Sandra and Dennis Sr Menace, parents of Dennis, and the dastardly Wilbur Brown, father of Walter the Softy.
Continue reading...In an interview marking the launch of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the US back to the 'competent, caring government we so badly need'.
He lamented the standard of governance over the past four years, saying Biden and Harris will 'level set' and show that the presidency will not label journalists 'enemies of the state' or 'routinely lie'
The Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford is launching a book club so that all children can experience the escapism of reading.
Teaming up with Macmillan Children’s Books (MCB) to promote reading and literacy among children from all socio-economic backgrounds, Rashford said he wished he had the chance to read more as a child but his family had to prioritise food over books when it came to budgeting.
Related: Mail on Sunday v Marcus Rashford: a sinister attack on a young black man | Jonathan Liew
Continue reading...Sci-fi anthology stalled since 1974 will be produced by executor, screenwriter J Michael Straczynski, adding stories by today’s big-name SF writers
It is the great white whale of science fiction: an anthology of stories by some of the genre’s greatest names, collected in the early 1970s by Harlan Ellison yet mysteriously never published. But almost 50 years after it was first announced, The Last Dangerous Visions is finally set to see the light of day.
The late Ellison changed the face of sci-fi with the publication of anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, in 1968 and 1972, which featured writing by the likes of Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula K Le Guin. Ellison, who was known for his combative nature – JG Ballard called him “an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts life at a shout and his fiction at a scream” – announced a third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, would be published in 1974. Contributors were said to include major names such as Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Octavia Butler and Daniel Keyes.
[Ellison] incurred moral dilemmas by retaining purchased but unpublished stories for close on 50 years
Continue reading...Bestselling writer says no state has moral right to close bookshops
A group of French authors has promised to pay fines imposed on the country’s bookshops that remain open in defiance of coronavirus lockdown rules.
The pledge was made by the bestselling writer Alexandre Jardin, who said authors were getting together to support booksellers during the crisis.
Continue reading...Pan Macmillan says it is ‘finalising its contractual relationship’ with Evans and retailers can return his books
The publisher of Pete Evans’ books has said it is “finalising” its relationship with the celebrity chef after he posted a cartoon on his social media accounts which included a neo-Nazi symbol used by the Christchurch terrorist.
The former My Kitchen Rules host on Sunday posted a cartoon on Facebook and Instagram to his over 1.5m followers of a caterpillar wearing a Make America Great Again hat talking to a black butterfly with a Black Sun symbol on its wing.
We are in the process of removing his books from our website and have advised our stores to return their stock as offered by the publisher. Thank you
Continue reading...The portrayal of Santa’s Moor servant ‘Zwarte Piet’ is widely seen as offensive. Protesters applaud the decision to remove the character from children’s books
Public libraries across the Netherlands are removing from the shelves children’s books depicting a black-faced Zwarte Piet, a side-kick to Sinterklaas, in the latest sign that the country is turning the page on a festive figure widely seen as being racist.
For at least a decade, there have been protests against the practice of white people with blackened faces, curly wigs and exaggerated bright red lips depicting the character at the nationwide parades held in early December to herald the feast of Saint Nicholas.
Continue reading...Printed book sales plunge in first six months of 2020 on back of shop and school closures
Sales of digital books by British publishers are set to hit an all-time high this year as the public turns to reading to escape pandemic cabin fever.
However, the ebook and audiobook boom comes at a high cost for the industry, with global sales of printed books by UK publishers plunging by 55m in the first six months of the year as high streets and schools closed during the first coronavirus lockdown.
Affectionate friendship between the two poets and artist Barrie Cooke, united by a love of fishing, revealed in a collection of correspondence that was believed lost
A “treasure trove” of unseen poems and letters by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke has revealed the depth of a close three-way friendship that one Cambridge academic has described as a “rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group”.
Cooke, who died in 2014, was a leading expressionist artist in Ireland, and a passionate fisherman. Fellow fishing enthusiast Mark Wormald, an English fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, came across his name while reading Hughes’s unpublished fishing diaries at the British Library. He visited Cooke in Ireland, and discovered the close friendship between the three men.
Continue reading...Campaign to fund statue by sculptor Laury Dizengremel of the author in Richmond receives thousands of pounds after naked Wollstonecraft statue divides public
After the controversial unveiling of a naked statue honouring Mary Wollstonecraft this week, plans to erect a public monument to a fully-clothed Virginia Woolf have gained fresh momentum.
Maggi Hambling’s Wollstonecraft sculpture in Newington Green, London, which depicts a silvery, naked woman, is intended to represent the “birth of a movement” rather than the writer known as the mother of feminism. But it has attracted a wave of criticism. The author Caroline Criado-Perez, who led the campaign for a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, described the decision-making process as “catastrophically wrong” and said the representation was “insulting” to Wollstonecraft.
Related: Why I hate the Mary Wollstonecraft statue: would a man be 'honoured' with his schlong out?
Continue reading...The Evidence by Christopher Priest; The Thief on the Winged Horse by Kate Mascarenhas; Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims; Witch Bottle by Tom Fletcher; These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
In The Evidence (Gollancz, £20), Christopher Priest makes a welcome return to the Dream Archipelago, a string of islands where nothing is as it first appears. Thriller writer Todd Fremde is invited to lecture at the university in Dearth, a subpolar island that undergoes destabilising changes in space and time known as “mutability”. While on the island he is approached by a semi-retired police commissioner; she recounts the details of a murder that occurred 15 years earlier. Fremde investigates the killing on his return home, only to discover that aspects of her story do not tally with the known facts. He soon finds himself drawn into a series of baffling events that threaten to bring the killer to his doorstep. With characteristic literary playfulness, Priest presents both a compelling mystery – Fremde’s attempts to work out the objective truth of the cold case – and a treatise on the unreliability of subjective narrative. The Evidence is an unsettling, Kafkaesque tour de force.
Continue reading...The then vice-president suggested Obama wait before ordering the mission that killed the al-Qaida leader in 2011, new memoir says
• Obama: ‘Americans spooked by black man in White House’ led to Trump presidency
Joe Biden advised Barack Obama to wait to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the former president writes in his new memoir.
Related: Joe Biden brought laughs, gaffes and authenticity to White House
Continue reading...‘Americans spooked by black man in the White House’ led to Trump being elected, ex-president writes in A Promised Land
Donald Trump “promised an elixir for the racial anxiety” of “millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House”, Barack Obama writes in his eagerly awaited memoir.
Those Americans, Obama writes, were prey to “the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.
Related: Barack Obama to take part in 2020 Booker prize ceremony
Continue reading...US president to speak about reading Booker novels at the online ceremony, two days after his memoir is published
Barack Obama is taking a short break from defending the cause of democracy in the US to take part in this year’s Booker prize ceremony next week.
The former US president is one of several guests due to appear at the online winner’s ceremony for the literary prize on 19 November. Earlier this year, the Booker ceremony was moved from 17 November by two days, ostensibly to avoid a clash with the arrival of the first volume of Obama’s new memoirs, A Promised Land, which is set to be one of the biggest books of 2020.
Continue reading...Caitlin McNamara says she will appeal the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to pursue Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan for the alleged attack in Abu Dhabi
The British woman who accused a United Arab Emirates senior royal of sexually assaulting her has vowed to fight on after the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute him last month, saying that the CPS decision sends “a clear message to this man and those committing similar crimes that as long as they’re of economic value to the UK, they can do whatever they want”.
Caitlin McNamara, who was the curator of the first Hay festival in Abu Dhabi in February, went public with her accusations last month. She alleges that Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, the UAE’s minister of tolerance, had attacked her shortly before the festival, which his department had funded. McNamara had believed she would be attending a business meeting with the royal, who denies the allegations through a London lawyer: “Our client is surprised and saddened by this allegation, which arrives eight months after the alleged incident and via a national newspaper. The account is denied.”
I knew the moment I left that villa that I wouldn’t get justice for what he did to me
Related: Prosecution service under fire over record low rape convictions
Continue reading...Nigerian author’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, which won in 2007, named the best book in the prize’s 25-year history by the public
Thirteen years after she won the Women’s prize for fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel about the Biafran war, Half of a Yellow Sun, has been voted the “winner of winners” of the literary award in a public vote.
The one-off prize, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the award, was judged by members of the public, who were asked to name their favourite of the 25 winners. Adichie’s novel, which follows the lives of several characters caught up in the civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, beat titles including Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. More than 8,500 people voted, according to the prize.
Related: Women's prize at 25: what it is like to win by Zadie Smith, Naomi Alderman and more
Continue reading...The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again wins the £10,000 prize for ‘fiction that breaks the mould’
M John Harrison’s “realist fantasy” novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again has won the speculative fiction author the Goldsmiths prize, which rewards “fiction that breaks the mould”.
Related: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison review – brilliantly unsettling
Continue reading...The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again wins the £10,000 prize for ‘fiction that breaks the mould’
M John Harrison’s “realist fantasy” novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again has won the speculative fiction author the Goldsmiths prize, which rewards “fiction that breaks the mould”.
Related: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison review – brilliantly unsettling
Continue reading...While books about the outgoing US president have been bestsellers for the last four years, Trump might be a step too far for some publishers
Fact-checkers are quaking in their boots amid reports that Donald Trump could be being “courted for a new tome on his time in the White House”. The Murdoch-owned tabloid the New York Post quoted a “source familiar with the president” on Tuesday, who claimed that Trump was “being bombarded with book and TV deals that could be worth a staggering $100m”.
To put that in context: Barack and Michelle Obama’s joint deal with Penguin Random House after they left the White House was reported to have been for more than $60m (£43.3m), then a record sum. Bill Clinton’s 2004 memoir netted him $15m, while George W Bush earned around $10m for his 2010 book Decision Points.
Related: Eight of the best books about Donald Trump
Continue reading...The Danish actor is reportedly first in line to play ‘dark wizard’ Gellert Grindelwald in the third Harry Potter prequel
Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen is set to replace Johnny Depp as Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts 3, it has been reported.
According to Deadline, Mikkelsen is in talks to join the cast of the third instalment of the JK Rowling-scripted fantasy series, which had been derailed by the failure of Depp’s libel action against the Sun. Depp said he had been “asked to resign” by Warner Bros, the producing studio, and had left the project.
Related: The fall of Johnny Depp: how the world's most beautiful movie star turned very ugly
Continue reading...According to UK study, just 5% of children’s books have black, Asian or minority ethnic protagonists – a small improvement from 1% in 2017
Two years after the stark revelation that only 1% of British children’s books featured a main character who was black, Asian or minority ethnic, the proportion has increased to 5%, according to new analysis. But a child from an ethnic minority background is far more likely to encounter an animal protagonist when reading a book than a main character sharing their ethnicity.
Two new reports into representation in children’s books are published on Wednesday, with the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) finding that 5% of children’s books published in the UK last year had an ethnic minority main character, compared to 4% in 2018 and just 1% in 2017.
We need to make sure that the incremental increase doesn’t make us complacent, or doesn’t make us feel like we’re kind of done
Continue reading...Booksellers Association appeals to government to reopen England’s bookshops in second lockdown, as supermarkets and newsagents allowed to keep selling books
The Booksellers Association has called on the government to classify bookshops as essential retailers during England’s second lockdown, as other retailers that sell books like WH Smith and supermarkets get to remain open.
In a letter to government ministers today, the BA’s managing director Meryl Halls described bookshops as “lanterns of civilisation and, for many, beacons of hope”. Keeping them closed while allowing other retailers who sell books to remain open was “potentially ruinous commercially and is also morally problematic”, she wrote.
Continue reading...Books worth more than £2.5m found in Romania after Mission Impossible-style theft
Hundreds of internationally important and irreplaceable books worth more than £2.5m that were stolen in a daring heist by abseiling burglars have been returned to their rightful owners.
Metropolitan police announced the successful conclusion on Tuesday of a near four-year police operation investigating the Mission Impossible-style theft of books that included rare works by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and the 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.
Continue reading...British comedy writer John Finnemore has solved Cain’s Jawbone, a murder mystery that has 32m possible combinations
One of the world’s most fiendish literary puzzles – a murder mystery in which all the pages are out of order – has been solved for just the third time in almost a century.
Cain’s Jawbone was dreamed up by the Observer’s first cryptic crossword inventor, Edward Powys Mathers, who was known as Torquemada. First published in 1934, it invites the reader to reorder the book’s 100 pages – there are more than 32m possible combinations – and solve the murders within.
Continue reading...Collins records a 6,000% increase in usage of the word since 2019, with TikToker and Megxit ranking among mostly coronavirus-related terms
Lockdown, the noun that has come to define so many lives across the world in 2020, has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary.
Lockdown is defined by Collins as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”, and its usage has boomed over the last year. The 4.5bn-word Collins Corpus, which contains written material from websites, books and newspapers, as well as spoken material from radio, television and conversations, registered a 6,000% increase in its usage. In 2019, there were 4,000 recorded instances of lockdown being used. In 2020, this had soared to more than a quarter of a million.
Continue reading...Director wrote to Boris Pasternak in late 1950s, previously unpublished material reveals
It is one of the greatest British films of all time, directed in 1965 by David Lean with an A-list cast that included Julie Christie, Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness. But the epic adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s classic love story set against the Russian revolution, might never have happened if a planned US production had got there first.
James Fenwick, a British film historian, has discovered that two of cinema’s most revered film-makers – Hollywood star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick – had tried in vain to acquire the movie rights earlier, in the late 1950s.
Related: Kirk Douglas obituary
Continue reading...The great novelist saw himself as a poet, and newly found stanzas show him berating his own bestseller in verse
Previously unpublished love poems written by Anthony Burgess to each of his two wives have been discovered, along with a verse in which he dismissed A Clockwork Orange, the savage satire for which he is best known, as “a foul farrago”, urging people to read Shakespeare and Shelley instead.
They are among dozens of unknown poems that have been found, the majority in his vast archive held by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, an educational charity in Manchester, where the writer was born in 1917.
Continue reading...Appearing at Guardian Australia’s Zoom book club, the author reflected on mortality, kindness and her second volume of diaries, One Day I’ll Remember This
• Guardian Australia’s book club happens monthly on Zoom, hosted via Australia at Home
• Read an extract from One Day I’ll Remember This
How does it feel to be Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most respected authors, having published not one but two volumes of her very personal diaries? “It feels like my guts are hanging out on the clothesline,” the author said.
In a thoughtful and frank discussion with Michael Williams as part of Guardian Australia’s monthly book club, hosted over Zoom in partnership with Australia At Home and Sydney writers’ festival, Garner delved into topics of regret, reader backlash and the anxieties she felt in poring over her scribbled-down past to make it ready for public consumption.
Related: Jimmy Barnes: ‘I think it’s criminal the way the government has treated the arts’
Related: Guardian Australia's Book Club: why does medicine care so little about women's bodies?
Continue reading...Actor will head all-star cast for animated version of the beloved author’s novel for children The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Hugh Laurie is to star as Maurice, a streetwise tomcat, in an animated film adaptation from Sky of one of Terry Pratchett’s best-loved novels, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
The film has the support of Pratchett’s estate, and is produced in association with Narrativia, Pratchett’s production company. This sits in contrast to BBC America and BBC Studios’ forthcoming adaptation of Pratchett’s books about Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch, The Watch, which Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna Pratchett has said “shares no DNA with my father’s Watch”.
Continue reading...Writers including Matt Haig, Malorie Blackman and Adam Kay are backing #SignForOurBookshops, autographing bookplates by Chris Riddell to boost trade
Matt Haig, Malorie Blackman and Adam Kay are among hundreds of authors who have come together in a “thunderclap of support” to encourage readers to buy from their local bookshop, as a second lockdown in England forces stores up and down the country to close.
Booksellers across the UK were already struggling after the national lockdown this spring, with some coronavirus restrictions still in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But they fear the additional impact of closures imposed in the run-up to Christmas, when some of the year’s most popular books are released and there is usually a surge in sales.
Continue reading...Melbourne writer’s magical realist work revealed ‘assured new Australian literary voice’, judges said
Melbourne writer Aisling Smith has won the $10,000 Richell prize for emerging writers for 2020 for what the judges hailed as an “assured and evocative” novel.
More than 800 entries were submitted for the prize, which is co-presented by publishing company Hachette Australia, the Emerging Writers festival and Guardian Australia. In addition to offering the winner $10,000, it also grants them a 12-month mentorship with a publisher at Hachette Australia.
Related: How one man escaped the Holocaust and saved his family by performing as a clown
Related: Richell prize 2020: read an extract from Aisling Smith's winning novel, Petrichor
Continue reading...The youngest ever winner of the prestigious award used science to compile a ‘manual for humans’
Dr Camilla Pang, whose debut uses science to explore the complexities of human behaviour through the prism of her autism spectrum disorder, has won the prestigious Royal Society science book prize.
At 28, the post-doctoral scientist is both the youngest writer ever to win the £25,000 prize, and the first writer of colour. She beat former winners Bill Bryson and Gaia Vince to take the award for Explaining Humans, which chair of judges Professor Anne Osbourn called “an intelligent and charming investigation into how we understand human behaviour, drawing on the author’s superpower of neurodivergence”.
Continue reading...Beloved London travel and map specialist has launched an online scheme to help stave off closure
It’s a wet autumnal day, a second lockdown is looming, and like many in the UK I’m dreaming of faraway shores, sunny uplands and wild adventures. Anything other than the unholy pairing of pandemic plus British winter.
My bookshelves are well-equipped to assist in my fantasies, bulging with reminders of travels past: every country map for motorcycling the Pan-American Highway, a guide to trekking the Sinai peninsula, the classic Michelin 741 Sahara map from my London to Cape Town ride, a map of Tehran’s metro system, a kayaker’s guide to UK rivers, and more Ordnance Survey maps than you could shake a carbon-fibre hiking pole at.
Continue reading...Booksellers say interest in black authors has surged since George Floyd’s death and BLM protests
Black-owned bookshops in the UK are calling for better representation of black authors in the long-term after reporting a surge in interest following the protests over the summer sparked by the killing of George Floyd and by Black History Month.
“We want people to see reading books by black authors as a habit, as opposed to something you pick up in October”, said Carolynn Bain, who set up an online shop stocking books of black origin in July after she became frustrated by the lack of black literature available in the UK.
Continue reading...Bookshop.org, which launched in the US earlier this year, has accelerated UK plans and goes online this week in partnership with more than 130 shops
It is being described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”: a socially conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is open in the UK from today.
Bookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin – 30% of the cover price – from each sale. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days.
Continue reading...The artist behind the Ladybird-style series on how her absurdly surreal new book is her answer to coping with coronavirus
The artist who created a smash hit series of spoof Ladybird Peter and Jane books has turned her attention to the Covid lockdown, creating a new edition in the series that is set to top the Christmas bestseller lists.
In We Do Lockdown, Miriam Elia, a visual artist, has her characters Mummy, John and Susan swamping their garden in bleach, taping off Granny’s house with hazardous material tape and growing highly sceptical of scientific advice.
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