The Crown Prosecution Service says it will not pursue case of woman who says sheikh assaulted her while she was working for the Hay festival Abu Dhabi
The Crown Prosecution Service has declined to prosecute a United Arab Emirates senior royal accused of sexually assaulting a British woman working with his ministerial department to set up a literature festival in Abu Dhabi, arguing that there was not enough evidence that the sheikh was acting in his official duties during the alleged attack.
Caitlin McNamara was the curator of the inaugural Hay festival in Abu Dhabi, which was feted as an opportunity to promote freedom of expression, human rights and women’s rights in the UAE. Earlier this month, she waived her right to anonymity to publicly accuse Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan of sexually assaulting her on 14 February, 11 days before the festival. McNamara alleged the attack happened during what she thought would be a business meeting to discuss the festival, which was being funded by Nahyan’s department, the ministry of tolerance.
More than 100 leading black authors have signed a letter condemning the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch for saying some authors want racial division
More than 100 leading black writers including Bernardine Evaristo, Malorie Blackman and Benjamin Zephaniah have condemned recent comments made by equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, in which she claimed that some authors of bestselling anti-racism books “actually want a segregated society”.
The letter, signed by 101 members of the Black Writers’ Guild and to be published on Friday, comes days after one of its members, Reni Eddo-Lodge, announced she would be lodging a complaint with the independent press regulator Ipso over the remarks made by Badenoch in the Spectator.
Authors, booksellers and publishers appeal to government for special status so ‘social confinement does not also become cultural isolation’
French authors, booksellers and publishers are imploring the French government to allow bookshops to stay open because reading is “essential”, as the country enters a national four-week lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus.
France’s second lockdown, announced on Wednesday evening by president Emmanuel Macron, begins at midnight on Thursday. Macron said he hoped it would put a “brutal brake” on the infection rate, as France is “submerged by the acceleration of the spread of the virus”. All non-essential businesses, including bars and restaurants, are to close, while individuals will require sworn declarations to leave home.
The identity of Anonymous, a Trump official who claimed there was a “a quiet resistance” within the administration working to save America in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, has been revealed as Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
Bestselling author says the magazine has refused to apologise for printing remarks made by junior equalities minister Kemi Badenoch
Reni Eddo-Lodge, the bestselling author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, has demanded a correction and apology from the Spectator after it printed comments from junior minister for equalities Kemi Badenoch that Eddo-Lodge says implies that she supports racial segregation.
Writing on Twitter on Wednesday, Eddo-Lodge announced that she had contacted the Spectator for a correction to its 22 October interview, which ran under the headline “Kemi Badenoch: The problem with critical race theory”. Before the comment Eddo-Lodge has complained about, Badenoch is described as feeling “particularly incensed by the boom in sales of texts such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race”.
The landmark store has seen sales fall 80% since March, and with a new lockdown expected has asked for orders from those who can afford it
One of the world’s most iconic bookshops, Shakespeare and Company, has appealed to its customers for help as it is struggling, with sales that are down almost 80% since March.
The celebrated Parisian bookstore told readers on Wednesday that it was facing “hard times” as the Covid-19 pandemic keeps customers away. France is expected to impose a new four-week national lockdown as coronavirus cases continue to surge; large swathes of the country, including Paris, are already under a night-time curfew.
Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth will be released this year, with the 86-year-old author also planning fresh theatre work after ‘continuous writing’ in lockdown
Wole Soyinka has used his time in lockdown to write his first novel in almost 50 years.
The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973.
Manuscript including lives of the Irish saints and a translation of Marco Polo was captured during a siege of Kilbrittain Castle in the 1640s
A 15th-century medieval manuscript, one of the “great books of Ireland”, is returning home almost 400 years after it was captured in a siege.
The Book of Lismore, which has been donated to University College Cork by the trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, was compiled for Fínghin Mac Carthaigh, the Lord of Carbery from 1478 to 1505. It consists of 198 large vellum folios containing some of medieval Irish literature’s greatest masterpieces, including the lives of Irish saints, the only surviving Irish translation of the travels of Marco Polo, and the adventures of the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Finn MacCool.
The Harry Potter publisher, Bloomsbury, has reported its most profitable first half in more than a decade, after a nation tiring of box sets fuelled a lockdown boom in book sales.
The company furloughed staff as the coronavirus crisis forced the publishing industry to shut down, but has seen a remarkable change in fortune as the pandemic has persisted.
Last week Robotham became the first Australian-born writer to collect the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger prize twice, for his psychological thriller Good Girl, Bad Girl.
An advance chapter from Barack Obama’s first memoir of his White House years, published on Monday by the New Yorker, takes readers inside the epic political battle behind the passage of the Affordable Care Act at the end of his first year of office.
Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here
Peter Florence, the director of the event since its inception, has been signed off pending the outcome of a grievance procedure
Peter Florence, the founder and director of the Hay festival, has been suspended from his position after allegations of bullying from a staff member.
The festival’s chair, Caroline Michel, said that Florence was suspended on 1 October “pending the outcome of a grievance procedure initiated by one of our staff”. He has since been signed off sick, and Michel said in a statement that she was “not at liberty to offer any further comment on personnel issues until this matter is resolved”.
Caroline Bird, whose book was inspired by the first year of a relationship, takes £10,000 honour for best collection alongside awards for Will Harris and Malika Booker
British poets have won all of this year’s Forward prizes for poetry, with Caroline Bird’s “audacious and erotically charged” The Air Year taking best collection, Will Harris’s RENDANG winning best debut, and Malika Booker winning for best single poem.
Bird’s sixth collection The Air Year, named for the first 12 months of a relationship before the “paper” anniversary, was announced as the winner of the £10,000 prize in an online ceremony Sunday afternoon. A playwright, and published poet since the age of 15, Bird saw off competition from the acclaimed Native American-Latinx Natalie Diaz and the award-winning Pascale Petit.
Newly unearthed correspondence shows deep respect between Peter Pan and Treasure Island authors, who never met
They are two of the greatest writers in history and they were also the greatest of friends. But they never met, and the importance and intensity of their relationship has never before been fully understood.
Now, the lost letters of JM Barrie to Robert Louis Stevenson – missing for over a century – have been found in a cardboard box in a library archive and will be published for the first time in a forthcoming book. The letters reveal how ardently the young Barrie both adored and admired Stevenson, who was an older and more established writer. A year into their friendship, which was initiated by Stevenson, Barrie wrote to him: “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman...” He leaves the sentence unfinished.
Lit in Colour, the publisher’s partnership with the Runnymede Trust, hopes to redress imbalances in English literature courses
The book publisher Penguin Random House has teamed up with the thinktank the Runnymede Trust to boost diversity in reading lists in schools.
The partnership - Lit in Colour - follows a recent report by Teach First which found that pupils could leave school in England without studying a novel or play by a black or minority ethnic author.
Friend of Maltese journalist recounts her battles against corruption for young readers
Her death brought thousands of people on to the streets of Malta and led to the resignation of a prime minister. Now the life of the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has inspired a book for children.
Written and illustrated by her friend Gattaldo, the designer, Fearless: The Story of Daphne Caruana Galizia is being released by a UK publisher this month to mark three years since the Maltese writer was killed by a car bomb in October 2017.
Fearless: The Story of Daphne Caruana Galizia is published by Otter-Barry, and is available from otterbarrybooks.com for £12.99.
Proprietor Nancy Bass-Wyden appeals to customers as literary landmark suffers the effects of the pandemic
The Strand Bookstore, a landmark of literary New York, is in serious trouble, appealing for customers to help it stave off closure amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Shirley Hughes and Philip Pullman among signatories of letter decrying lack of provision
More than 200 children’s authors , including Shirley Hughes, Philip Pullman, Malorie Blackman and Matt Haig, have put their names to a letter decrying the government’s vote against providing free school meals for children in England during half-term.
This week, Conservative MPs rejected a Labour motion, inspired by the footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign on child hunger, by 322 votes to 261. Rashford has urged MPs to unite and stop being influenced by “political affiliation”.
Charity says ebooks borrowing up 146% from March to August, with crime thrillers popular
They may have been closed for months during lockdown, but amid long days and many on furlough it has emerged that the nation turned to local libraries for cultural sustenance – with a surge in the lending of ebooks, and crime thrillers in particular.
In total, more than 3.5m additional ebooks were borrowed between the end of March and mid-August, according to the charity Libraries Connected, an increase of 146%. Adding audiobooks and e-comics, there was an increase of 5m digital items borrowed.
Curator of Hay’s inaugural festival in Abu Dhabi has accused Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan of sexual assault, which he denies
Hay literature festival will not return to Abu Dhabi until a senior Gulf royal is removed from his post as the United Arab Emirates’ minister of tolerance, after the curator of the inaugural Hay festival in the country accused him of sexual assault.
Caitlin McNamara was the curator of the first sister festival in Abu Dhabi, which was feted as an opportunity to promote freedom of expression, human rights and women’s rights in the UAE. In an interview with the Sunday Times, she accused Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan of sexually assaulting her on 14 February, 11 days before the festival began.
Plans to convert the Dublin home in Joyce’s 1914 story The Dead provoked a swift backlash from writers including Sally Rooney and Colm Tóibín
Dublin city council has greenlit a controversial plan to convert the house made famous by James Joyce’s story The Dead into a hostel, with a campaign group supported by writers including Sally Rooney, Colm Tóibín and Edna O’Brien saying they will appeal the decision.
The property, at 15 Usher’s Island, was built in 1775 and was once home to Joyce’s great aunts. Known locally as “the House of The Dead”, it is the setting for the Irish writer’s 1914 short story, widely considered a masterpiece of the form.
Beloved children’s author will reflect on illness that put him in intensive care for 47 days using mix of poems and nurses’ ward notes
After spending 47 days in intensive care fighting coronavirus, Michael Rosen is bringing out a book about his experiences with the illness, from the doctor who said he had a 50/50 chance of survival to the nurses who cared for him while in a coma.
The former children’s laureate, one of Britain’s most beloved authors, will publish his coronavirus diaries, a mix of prose poems and extracts from the notes written by nurses on his hospital ward, in March next year – 12 months after he first fell ill. The poet went home in June having lost most of the sight in his left eye and hearing in his left ear, and having to learn to walk again.
The Tower of Fools by Andrzej Sapkowski; Midway by Tony Ballantyne; The Saints of Salvation by Peter F Hamilton; Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott; and The House of a Hundred Whispers by Graham Masterton
Polish fabulist Andrzej Sapkowski, author of the bestselling Witcher series of epic fantasies now filmed for Netflix, begins a new trilogy with The Tower of Fools, translated by David French (Gollancz, £20). It’s a typically sprawling narrative set in 15th-century Europe during the chaotic Hussite revolution, in which religious reformers fought Catholic armies loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor. Noble Reynevan, physician and practitioner of the dark arts, is caught in the boudoir of Adèle of Stercza. When her brothers give chase, one of them dies in pursuit, and the survivors vow vengeance. What follows is the record of Reynevan’s perilous flight south through central Europe, in which our cocksure hero is pursued by the brothers and various political factions. He’s accompanied by knights, rebels and new love Nicolette, as well as Samson, a demon in human form. Sapkowski peppers the story with telling period detail, vivid and violent set pieces, and scatological humour. After a slow start, in which the historical and political backdrop is filled in by characters discoursing at length, the narrative settles into a bloody but satisfying picaresque.
The Haunting of Alma Fielding joins five other books, whose subjects range from the Beatles to the brain, competing for the £50,000 prize for nonfiction
Former winner Kate Summerscale has made the shortlist for the UK’s top prize for nonfiction, the Baillie Gifford award, for her “true ghost story”, The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
Six titles are now in the running for the £50,000 prize. Summerscale’s contender traces how Alma Fielding, an ordinary young woman in 1930s suburban London, begins to experience supernatural events, and follows the investigations of Nandor Fodor, chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research.
Judges say the 10 poetry collections nominated for £25,000 award are ‘as urgent as they are artful’
The prestigious TS Eliot prize has revealed a shortlist that shows that poetry is “the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have”.
Announcing the 10 titles in the running for the £25,000 award for the year’s best collection, the most valuable prize in British poetry, the poet and chair of judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, said the jury had been “unsettled, captivated and compelled” by the books they chose.
Influential artist, hailed by Martin Parr as a ‘key player’ in British photography, captured human dignity amid industrial decline in England’s north-east
The British documentary photographer Chris Killip has died aged 74. He had been suffering from lung cancer. Killip was best known for his seminal series, In Flagrante, which he made in the industrial north-east of England between 1973 and 1985. He later said of the photobook of the same name, published in 1988: “History is what’s written, my pictures are what happened.”
Of the influential generation of British documentary photographers that came of age in the 1970s, Killip was perhaps the most hard-hitting and the most humanist. “Chris is without a doubt one of the key players in postwar British photography,” said his friend and fellow photographer, Martin Parr, who also describes In Flagrante as “the key photobook about Britain since the war.”
Rhianna Pratchett joins fans unhappy with the forthcoming TV adaptation of her father’s Discworld stories about Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch
Terry Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna Pratchett has said that the forthcoming television adaptation of the late author’s stories about Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch “shares no DNA with my father’s Watch”, and that she “should know”.
The Watch, a new series from BBC America and BBC Studios, will air in January in the US, but a trailer shared over the weekend has prompted an outpouring of criticism from fans. Describing itself as “inspired by” Pratchett’s novels about the City Watch, the new trailer for the series shows Richard Dormer as a punk-rock version of the Watch’s grizzled commander Sam Vimes, in a show that BBC America is pitching as about a band of “misfit cops as they fight to save a ramshackle city of normalised wrongness from both the past and future in a perilous quest”.
Newly unearthed files reveal that the author and his wife were under Soviet surveillance while fighting in civil war
They had a common enemy in General Franco’s fascist-backed army, but that did not stop legions of communists, revolutionaries and anarchists in 1930s Spain warring among themselves, fuelled by internecine rivalries and paranoia.
Now, new evidence has emerged that one of the most famous international fighters on the Republican side of the Spanish civil war was under surveillance by communist military intelligence.
The actor on David Byrne’s kooky show, the joy of mountain walks and a moving memoir by a gay Muslim
Actor Russell Tovey was born in Essex in 1981. He had his big break in 2004 as one of The History Boys in Alan Bennett’s award-winning stage play and subsequent film. He has since appeared in a number of acclaimed TV shows including Being Human and Him & Her, and was nominated for a 2020 Critics’ Choice award for best supporting actor in Years and Years. Tovey is also an art lover, and in 2018 launched the podcast Talk Art with gallerist Robert Diament co-hosting. He stars in Neil Cross’s drama The Sister on ITV later this month.
Appearing at Guardian Australia’s Zoom book club, the rock star discussed the arts crisis, mental health and his third memoir, Killing Time
• Guardian Australia’s book club happens monthly on Zoom, hosted via Australia at Home
Australian rock star Jimmy Barnes is not known for his subtlety, either in music or in life – and he was characteristically forthright on Friday afternoon when asked about the federal government’s response to the arts crisis caused by Covid.
“I think it’s criminal the way the government has treated the arts,” Barnes said. “It’s actually shameful … I don’t think they realise how important music, art, literature, film is to the wellbeing of people.”
With more than 1,200 co-signatories in North America including Neil Gaiman and NK Jemisin, message follows row over comments by JK Rowling
Stephen King and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to an open letter offering support to the trans and non-binary communities of the US and Canada, as a bitter divide over trans rights continues to split the literary world.
The message from writers and members of the US literary community follows a similar letter from authors in the UK and Ireland. Both letters come in the wake of a fierce row over JK Rowling’s comments on trans rights, including her comment that “if sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased”.
The author on his friendship with Gene Wolfe, crying over Diana Wynne Jones and falling under the spell of CS Lewis
The book I am currently reading The Invention of Jane Harrison by Mary Beard. I’m fascinated by Hope Mirrlees, and her relationship with Jane Harrison was one of the ingredients of her life. They collaborated on a book of translated Russian tales, and Harrison’s theories seem integral both to Paris, Mirrlees’s modernist poem and to Lud-in-the-Mist. I’m loving watching Mary Beard deconstruct and re-examine ideas about what biography is in this short but brilliant book. Also Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes. I’m reading it slowly and with delight, an essay at a time, rejoicing in the easy erudition and the way she upends what I thought I knew and gives me something much more interesting in its place.
The book that changed my life The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It’s brilliant, much more brilliant than I knew when I read it for the first time. I would not be the writer I am without Wolfe’s friendship, or without taking his lesson that you should write to be reread with increased pleasure by a smart reader.
The Swedish Academy has chosen the American poet, citing her ‘unmistakable poetic voice’
The poet Louise Glück has become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 27 years, cited for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Glück is the 16th woman to win the Nobel, and the first American woman since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. The American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was a surprise winner in 2016.
Born in 1943, Glück has written 12 collections of poetry and two book of essays. Her most recent collection was 2014’s Faithful and Virtuous Night. Over a career spanning six decades, she has explored trauma, death and healing, in poems that scholars have argued are both confessional and not. As Olsson, chair of the Nobel, said earlier: “She is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality.” (Some poets may dispute that being an either-or.)
“Don’t forget to read our marvellous laureate,” Olsson says cheerfully, before wrapping up the conference. Well that’s that!
The Guardian’s resident poetry expert, Carol Rumens, cast an eye over a poem from Glück’s most recent collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, back in 2014. You can read it below.
Explaining their decision, Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee says Glück’s voice “is candid and uncompromising and signals that this poet wants to be understood. She has humour and biting wit.
“Even if her autobiographical background is significant in her works, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality ... Three characteristics unite to reoccur in her works: the topic of family life, an austere but also playful intelligence, and a refined sense of composition.”
This makes Glück the 16th woman to win:
Selma Lagerlof, 1909
US poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”#NobelPrizepic.twitter.com/Wbgz5Gkv8C
The Japanese novelist is frequently high up in the odds – so much so that a group of diehard fans, also known as “Harukists”, tend to gather each year to watch the ceremony, tumblers of whisky (a motif in his novels) at hand. Japan’s love for Murakami is greater than that for even other Japanese contenders; when British-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro won in 2017, staff at Kinokuniya bookshop in Tokyo reportedly let out a groan before quickly disassembling their immaculate Murakami display and replacing it with Ishiguros.
With more than 100 books to her name, Joyce Carol Oates is rarely far from the adjective “prolific”. Novels, short stories, plays, poetry and criticism have poured from her in an unbroken stream since her debut collection of short fiction was published in 1963. Ranging across genre from thriller to romance and from horror to literary fiction, Oates has explored class, race, gender and the violence of modern society in novels such as Them (1969), Because it is Bitter and Because it is My Heart (1990), Blonde (2000) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).
We’re just 10 minutes away - you can watch the video at the top of this liveblog (you may need to refresh your browser if you joined us a while back). Enjoy watching some journalists looking nervous.
Fiammetta Rocco, culture correspondent at the Economist and the administrator of the International Booker prize, knows what she’s talking about when it comes to international literature. Her tips are first, Maryse Condé, “whose work just resonates more and more powerfully as time goes by”, and second, “my fellow Kenyan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for a lifetime of highly original writing, but especially for The Perfect Nine, which is published today. An epic in every sense of the word.”
Just as the same names come up each year, so to does the video of Doris Lessing finding out that she had won, from back in 2007. But it is too good not to share every time.
Another perennial contender is the Hungarian novelist, playwright and essayist Péter Nádas. He is best known internationally for his 700-page novel A Book of Memories, which divides the story of a young Hungarian writer growing up under communism between three narrators. When it was published in English in 1997, Eva Hoffman compared it to Proust and Musil in the New York Times, praising Nádas’ exploration of memory “in profligate and fantastically modulated detail, all the compressed meanings, the swirl and buzz of sensation and impression implicit in even the most mundane moments”. Susan Sontag hailed it as “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century”.
One of the most powerful and distinguished storytellers of our time: Toni Morrison, became the first African American woman to be awarded a #NobelPrize when she received the Literature Prize in 1993.
The Nobel Prize has just tweeted this. Does this mean we might see another black female laureate this year? Morrison remains the only black woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901.
Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel prize in literature, has given a little video interview to the people running the Nobel Twitter account. No insights about who they’re likely to announce, but there was one particularly intriguing snippet. Asked how Covid-19 has affected the committee’s work, Olsson says that things have “continued according to plan”.
“The only thing that has changed is of course our ways of meeting and communicating with one another. We have communicated more with secret codes and so forth and less physical meetings. I think everyone has experienced this,” says Olsson, failing to give any more detail about these secret codes and leaving me to believe that they have code names for all contenders, which I am now desperate to discover.
Yan Lianke has also been named as a possibility. The widely acclaimed Chinese novelist and short story writer has been given odds of 12/1 at Ladbrokes - he feels like a solid option. Some of his novels, which tend towards experimental, have been banned in China - The Day the Sun Died, which has been seen as a political critique of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream”, had to be published first in Taiwan.
Jacques Testard has form for picking - and publishing - Nobel winners. His small publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, is home to both Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk.
“I suspect it’ll be a woman, one of the names most bandied around these last few days – Anne Carson, Jamaica Kincaid, Can Xue,” says Testard. “If it isn’t, I hope it’ll be a non-European. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would be fantastic, overdue. Carlos Fuentes predicted César Aira would win in 2020 – he’d be a great choice. One of our authors is convinced it’ll be a Russian this year, which could mean Ludmila Ulitskaya, or Mikhail Shishkin. But ultimately your guess is as good as mine.”
The Canadian poet, translator and classicist is also a new tip, thanks to Björn Wiman, culture editor at Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, who doesn’t think the Swedish Academy will be put off by the fact that another Canadian, Alice Munro, won not so long ago (2013). The first woman to have won the TS Eliot prize for poetry, Carson is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and has also won prizes including the Griffin poetry prize.
Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan-American author who is seen as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers, is one new name doing the rounds this year. Kincaid was born in St John’s, Antigua as Elaine Potter Richardson, leaving Antigua at the age of 16 to work as an au pair in New York. She changed her name in 1973, partly for anonymity as she began writing stories for the New Yorker. From The Autobiography of My Mother to Annie John, her novels explore the Caribbean and family relationships, in particular those between mothers and daughters, and provide a fierce critique of colonialism. Her memoir My Brother was about her half-brother’s death from Aids.
Richard Osman is taking no chances: after publishing his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, earlier this autumn, he’s placed a tenner on himself landing the Nobel. The odds, he revealed on his Instagram, were 100/1. Not bad. “I mean, you never know, right?” wrote the comedian.
One of Russia’s leading contemporary novelists and short story writers, and a vocal advocate for freedom of expression, Lyudmila Ulitskaya began her writing career after she was sacked as a scientist in the 1960s, and accused of dissident activity by Soviet authorities for translating a banned American book into Russian. She holds the record for nominations for the Russian Booker prize, having been nominated five times and winning once (making her the first woman to win). In novels and collections such as The Funeral Party, Sonechka, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, and The Big Green Tent, she has explored the role of women in Russian domestic and public life, state surveillance, the intimacy and love found in non-traditional families, and faith.
Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé has very short odds this morning (not that that always helps you win the Nobel). She was the first and only winner of the New Academy prize in literature in 2018, a one-off award intended to fill the void left by the cancellation of the Nobel.
Last year, Anders Olsson, chair of the prize, said the jury needed to “widen our perspective”, given that the award’s previous two winners, Kazuo Ishiguro and Bob Dylan, were both men writing in English. “We had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature and now we are looking all over the world,” he said. “Previously it was much more male-oriented. Now we have so many female writers who are really great, so we hope the prize and the whole process of the prize has been intensified and is much broader in its scope.”
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Nobel prize in literature, which, in the words of my colleague Alison Flood earlier this week, “sees itself as the world’s pre-eminent literary award”, and will be announced at 12pm BST (1pm CEST).
Who will win is always a mystery - albeit a mystery with a recurring cast of contenders, with the occasional surprise (hey Bob Dylan, 2016’s Nobel laureate! Hey, you!) thrown in. Names tipped this year include the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid and Canadian poet Anne Carson. (Lots of women – we’ll get to that later.) In addition, there are the perennial big-name favourites who should have their speeches tucked away already – such as Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright.
Science fiction novelist is one of 21 writers, scientists and artists to win $625,000 stipends to ‘pursue their creative inclinations’
NK Jemisin, who four years ago launched a Patreon campaign to allow her to quit her day job and work full-time as a writer, has landed one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants, a $625,000 (£486,000), no-strings-attached award.
Science fiction novelist is one of 21 writers, scientists and artists to win $625,000 stipends to ‘pursue their creative inclinations’
NK Jemisin, who four years ago launched a Patreon campaign to allow her to quit her day job and work full-time as a writer, has landed one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants, a $625,000 (£486,000), no-strings-attached award.
Governor lists Covid-19 lessons in new book, American Crisis
Insists: ‘All I care about is getting New York through this’
In a new book, Andrew Cuomo blames Donald Trump for thousands of deaths in New York in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, decrying “federal negligence” he says led to “the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor”.
The Grotesques, an unsettling story exploring privilege in a university town, wins the £15,000 national short story award
Read the story below
Sarah Hall has become the first writer to win the BBC national short story award twice, with judges describing her as a virtuoso of the form. Hall, who previously took the £15,000 prize in 2013, won the annual competition again on Tuesday night for The Grotesques, a “timeless and unsettling” story that explores privilege, inequality and mother-daughter relationships in a university town. The prize, which is supported by Cambridge University, is initially judged blind.
“In perhaps the strongest field in the history of the award, Hall’s story still stood out,” said chair of judges and Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland. “A timeless, unsettling story rendered in exquisite prose, The Grotesques yields more with each reading, offering layer upon layer of meaning. It is the work of a writer who is not only devotedly committed to the short story genre but has become a master of it.”
The Zimbabwean novelist, shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for This Mournable Body, is accused of intending to incite public violence in Harare
Authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Carol Ann Duffy and Philippe Sands have called for charges against the Booker prize-shortlisted writer Tsitsi Dangarembga to be dropped ahead of her latest appearance in a Zimbabwe court this week, saying that any other conclusion would be “an outrage”.
Having been postponed in 2018, last year’s return drew heavy fire for the selection of Peter Handke, so experts expect a cautious choice this week
Jamaica Kincaid and Anne Carson have been tipped as possible winners of this week’s Nobel prize for literature, with the secretive jury expected to play it safe in the wake of three years of controversy.
The Nobel, which sees itself as the world’s pre-eminent literary award, will be awarded on Thursday afternoon. Names tipped at the bookies include Maryse Condé – the Guadeloupean novelist who won an “alternative” Nobel in 2018 – Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and perennial contender Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright. Observers have also speculated that the jury could be looking closely at the work of Antiguan-American writer Kincaid and Canadian poet Carson.
Noir master had a chilly reputation, but self-parodic Advice to an Employer – being published for the first time this month – shows him in a warmer light
Best known for his hardboiled stories starring private detective Philip Marlowe, a more playful side of Raymond Chandler is set to be revealed in a previously unpublished spoof of corporate culture, which was discovered in the Bodleian library in Oxford.
Chandler’s Advice to an Employer, which was found with several of the author’s papers, is being published in the Strand magazine this month for the first time. Short and comic, it sees the author doling out tongue-in-cheek advice such as, “Always tell your secretary you have nothing to dictate until it is time for dinner. Then rattle off a lot of letters you have left since domesday.”
Author, who became first non-binary trans writer to be nominated for the award in 2019, declines to submit future novels for consideration in protest
Akwaeke Emezi, who became the first non-binary transgender author to be nominated for the Women’s prize in 2019, has said that they will not let their future novels be entered for the award after the prize asked them for information on their sex as defined “by law”.
The award-winning poet and musician Kae Tempest has published their first work since announcing they are non-binary, a meditation on creativity and connection written for “others who don’t fit”.
On Connection, published this week by Faber & Faber, explores how in a time of division, “immersion in creativity can bring us closer to each other”. It is Tempest’s first piece of writing since the acclaimed artist announced they would be changing their name to Kae, and their pronoun to they in August.
Poet famed for A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford and his coronavirus poem Everything Is Going to be All Right, has died after a short illness
Derek Mahon, the Belfast-born poet who became an immense figure in Irish poetry with poems such as A Disused Shed in Co Wexford and Courtyards in Delft, has died at the age of 78 after a short illness.
Mahon, whose poetry career spanned a half-century, was most often compared to WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett, with the critic Brendan Kennelly calling him “a Belfast Keats with a Popean sting”. Several of his poems became staples of school curricula, and, as Ireland locked down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, RTÉ ended its evening news bulletin with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to be All Right, which includes the lines: “There will be dying, there will be dying, / but there is no need to go into that.”
Booker-winning novelist uses New Statesman/Goldsmiths prize lecture to attack ‘academics who still refuse to reassess their reading lists’
In the week in which it was revealed that many GCSE pupils never study a book by a black author, Bernardine Evaristo, the first black British author to win the Booker prize, has challenged “all those academics who value whiteness and maleness over other demographics”, saying they should feel ashamed.
In an excoriating speech for the New Statesman/Goldsmithsprize lecture, Evaristo slammed “all those academics who still refuse to engage with progressive conversations and reassess their reading lists”, saying that they were passing on their biases to the next generation of readers and thinkers.
The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris celebrates the magic of British wildlife
Their last book of poems about everyday wildlife became an international cultural phenomenon. Now Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, the creators of The Lost Words, have produced a new book conjuring up the magic of British wildlife in a time of ecological crisis.
The Lost Spells, which celebrates barn owls, swifts, gorse and foxes through poems and artwork, is already being adapted for music and film projects and live performances, including a concert to be livestreamed from the Natural History Museum early next year.
Lexicographer and Countdown personality says she can now attest to the power of ‘lalochezia’: swearing to alleviate stress
Countdown’s resident lexicographer Susie Dent has testified to the effectiveness of lalochezia, or “the use of swearing to alleviate stress and frustration”, after discovering that her new book Word Perfect was printed with a host of typos.
Dent said on Thursday that she had just found out that the initial printing of Word Perfect, which is described by its publisher as a “brilliant linguistic almanac”, had been completed using an early version of the text. “I’m so sorry about this. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can with details on how we’re going to fix it,” said Dent on Twitter, where said she was “gutted” over the error.
List celebrates high-achieving black British individuals over past 400 years
The model and transgender activist Munroe Bergdorf, the artist and film director Steve McQueen and the Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo are among the new names on a list celebrating key black individuals over the past 400 years.
