Alan Bennett contemplates losing friends and the Queen in 2022 diary

The playwright details Barry Cryer’s comedic phone calls and reveals what her majesty said to Prunella Scales in his annual journal for London Review of Books

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Trump left ‘shockingly gracious’ letter to Biden on leaving office, book says

The Fight of His Life, by Chris Whipple, recounts Joe Biden’s first two years in the White House

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Africa’s biggest photography library opens in Ghana

Ghanaian photographer’s crowdfunded project won support of Humans of New York author and boasts more than 30,000 books

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Hergé illustration for Tintin in America expected to sell for €2m

The drawing will be auctioned in Paris in February as part of a wider sale of the Tintin creator’s comic-book work

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James Patterson to complete unfinished Michael Crichton book

Late author’s estate has shared a manuscript with the bestselling novelist centered on a volcanic eruption in Hawaii

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‘Once-in-a-lifetime’ copy of Don Quixote fetches €500,000 at auction

Total of €900,000 paid for Cervantes’ works that a diplomat bought on a shopping trip to London in 1930s

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Contest challenges AI to solve legendary literary puzzle Cain’s Jawbone

The fiendish mystery set by Observer crossword compiler Torquemada in the 1930s has only been cracked by four people to date. Can machines do better?

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Ann Cleeves loses laptop containing draft of new book in Shetland blizzard

Crime writer offers reward for return of computer, thought to have fallen out of bag during wintry weather

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‘Something for everybody’: Dua Lipa joins Margaret Atwood on Hay festival 2023 lineup

Pop star and Booker prize winner will both appear at the literary festival in Wales next year along with rock duo the Proclaimers and poet laureate Simon Armitage

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Prime Minister’s Literary awards 2022: Nicolas Rothwell and Mark Willacy win major prizes

Rothwell’s second novel collected the fiction prize with Willacy’s follow-up to his 2020 investigation Killing Field winning for non-fiction

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Steer clear of ‘mediocre writing’ by celebrities for Christmas, authors plead

Books by TV personalities and other high-profile figures will top bestseller lists, but critics say professionals lose out

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Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society

Study shows the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s

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RuPaul’s Drag Race essay collection wins oddest book title of the year award

RuPedagogies of Realness wins the Bookseller/Diagram prize ahead of What Nudism Exposes and Frankenstein Was a Vegetarian

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Canadian journalist’s memoir accused of depicting sexual assault as consensual

Film-maker Zoe Greenberg says she raised concerns with Penguin Random House Canada over Leah McLaren’s book

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‘The handwriting is wrong’: Dickens letters dismissed as forgeries

Documents believed to have been written by author withdrawn from auction after expert doubts veracity

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‘Join the club’: Stephen King, Margaret Atwood and more reassure debut author after lonely book launch

Chelsea Banning tweeted about being ‘upset’ when only two friends showed up to her signing. Then some of the world’s biggest authors – and Flavor Flav – stepped in

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Writers’ earnings have plummeted – with women, Black and mixed race authors worst hit

Research shows that the income of professional authors averages only £7,000 in the UK, making the profession ‘inaccessible and unsustainable’ to most

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Nobel prize an institution ‘for men’, says literature laureate Annie Ernaux

Awards are ‘bound to tradition’, says French writer, praised by academy for ‘the courage and clinical acuity of her work’

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Europe’s largest Middle Eastern bookseller to close

Al Saqi Books in London, which was established in 1978, blames closure on rise in prices of Arabic-language books and ‘detrimental’ effect of Brexit

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DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign books

The GOP flopped in the midterms but its White House hopefuls still hope to find readers – and conservative group bulk-buyers

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Winnie the Pooh joins Chinese Covid lockdown protests

Disney merchandise shows frowning bear looking at blank sheet of paper – a symbol of opposition to censorship

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Michael Rosen writes poem in tribute to NHS nurses after Covid recovery

Children’s author who spent 48 days in hospital with virus calls NHS ‘a brilliant and wonderful invention’

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Paint him out: Katy Hessel’s retelling of art history is Waterstones book of the year

Hessel’s ‘beautifully written corrective’ The Story of Art Without Men is awarded alongside author of the year winner Bonnie Garmus for her book Lessons in Chemistry

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