Hilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year's shortlist.
About eight years ago, the Canadian novelist Susan Swan looked into the research about how female writers compared with male ones when it came to literary prizes and coverage. She was shocked by what she found.
"I thought it was going to be a happy progress report," she said in an interview. "Instead it was a bad news day." Read more
The richest literary prize in India - the JCB Prize for Literature, which confers ₹25 lakh on a writer of fiction, in English or translation-has already been announced. Read more
In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild - from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life. Read more
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
The plot: Under lock and key until publication day on 10 September, The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale and follows the lives of three women in Gilead.
What we said: Nothing yet! But it is set to be one of the biggest books of the year.
Most readers will have to wait until September to find out what happens in Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, but the Booker judges have deemed The Testaments worthy of a place on the 2019 longlist for the £50,000 literary prize.
The Booker Prize will be sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz's charitable foundation Crankstart in a five-year deal, it has been announced. But the Booker Prize has said it will not use the opportunity of the change in sponsor to reverse its controversial decision to allow US writers to enter the award.
The passage of time, 50 years of literary hoo-ha, has been both cruel and kind to the Man Booker prize, which will next month celebrate its half-century (the majority of those years as the Booker) at the Royal Festival Hall. Read more
If prizes are about boosting the book trade then the Booker prize shortlist is not a good one: determinedly unstarry in the first place, it has jettisoned even those namecheck authors who had made the longlist.
The Man Booker Prize gets so much attention from publishers that it "capsizes the literary world" and has an unhealthy effect on the market, according to the bestselling author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Read more
‘The thing I like about novels is that they are a more forgiving form. You can make missteps. It's harder to write a really good short story - I'm more aware of the flaws in my short stories.
Michael Morpurgo has denied a Sunday Times report that he "refused" to include The Merchant of Venice in a forthcoming Shakespeare anthology for children due to antisemitism. Read more
Pitching a manuscript isn't for cowards, the thin skinned, or those with no endurance. Believing your project is worthy, truly believing in it, is required, as is the patience of a saint.
Poets & Writers wrapped up its 50th anniversary in 2020 by announcing a $250,000 contribution from Barnes & Noble founder-and longtime P&W supporter-Len Riggio. The donation from Riggio and his wife, Louise, will be used for new initiatives to extend the organization's support of Black and marginalized writers.
George Saunders once said, ‘when you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you'...but what is the best way to start? Read more
George Orwell died at University College Hospital, London, on 21 January 1950 at the early age of 46. This means that unlike such long-lived contemporaries as Graham Greene (died 1991) or Anthony Powell (died 2000), the vast majority of his compendious output (21 volumes to date) is newly out of copyright as of 1 January. Read more
It might be a picture of gloom and doom for most business sectors in 2020 though surprisingly, the publishing sector has come out unscathed from the vagaries of the pandemic. Sales have largely been positive across all segments of the book industry, which includes printed books, eBooks, and audiobooks.
Open internationally.
Entry fee £28, £25 to subscribers to The North
Prize:
Publication by Smith|Doorstop Books; a share of £2,000 cash; a launch reading; publication in the North magazine; book vouchers from Inpress Books
The 2021 International Book & Pamphlet Competition is now open for entries
Judged by Daljit Nagra & Pascale Petit
DEADLINE: last post on Monday 1st March 2021, or midnight on Monday 1st March 2021 for online entrants.
ENTRY FEE: £28, or £25 for North subscribers, Friends of the Poetry Business and members of the Poetry Society. Read more
'People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.'
‘When I'm putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don't take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I'm nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. Read more
‘No one reads your book as closely as a translator does, which is something you learn very quickly. I'm in such awe of them. They also read beneath it and around it. They make me consider things I thought I knew the meaning of because I use those words in everyday dialect and that's how the characters express themselves.
In my latest romance novel, How to Catch a Queen, my heroine finally achieves her lifelong dream of becoming a queen following an arranged marriage-only to find herself in a country where the voices of women aren't respected, and queens are powerless. Read more
'I have to know where I'm going'
‘When I'm putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don't take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I'm nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. Read more