PM pays tribute to country’s best-known novelist as coffin is covered in national flag and flowers
Thousands of Albanians have gathered in Tirana to pay tribute to their country’s best-known novelist, Ismail Kadare, who died on Monday after a heart attack.
Flags flew at half-mast as the 88-year-old writer and poet’s coffin lay in state in the entrance hall of the Opera and Ballet theatre in Skanderbeg Square, surrounded by National Guard officers.
Continue reading...Insolvency advisers are assessing the business while options for its sale or recapitalisation are explored
Booktopia has entered into voluntary administration, but will continue filling orders and selling to the public under supervision from an insolvency adviser.
Australia’s largest online bookseller announced the move on Wednesday, two weeks after it went into a voluntary suspension of share trading.
Continue reading...Much-lauded Praiseworthy joins works by Gregory Day, André Dao, Sanya Rushdi, Jen Craig and Hossein Asgari competing for Australia’s highest literary honour
Alexis Wright continues her dream run with the acclaimed novel Praiseworthy, one of six books announced as the shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award, Australia’s highest literary honour.
Announced on Tuesday, the other five books up for the $60,000 prize are Gregory Day’s The Bell of the World, André Dao’s Anam, Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, Jen Craig’s Wall and Hossein Asgari’s Only Sound Remains.
Continue reading...Education superintendent and Moms for Liberty ally drafts law requiring all reading be ‘developmentally appropriate’
South Carolina has implemented one of the most restrictive book ban laws in the US, enabling mass censorship in school classrooms and libraries across the state.
Drafted by Ellen Weaver, the superintendent of education and close ally of the far-right group Moms for Liberty, the law requires all reading material to be “age or developmentally appropriate”. The vague wording of the legislation – open to interpretation and deliberately inviting challenge – could see titles as classic as Romeo and Juliet completely wiped from school shelves.
Continue reading...Over 200 signatories urge government to reverse decision enabling action against writer under anti-terrorism law
More than 200 Indian academics, activists and journalists have published an open letter urging the Indian government to withdraw last week’s decision sanctioning the prosecution of the Booker prize-winning author Arundhati Roy under the country’s stringent anti-terrorism law.
“We … deplore this action and appeal to the government and the democratic forces in the country to ensure that no infringement of the fundamental right to freely and fearlessly express views on any subject takes place in our nation,” the group said in the letter.
Continue reading...The prolific actor appeared in more than 190 films and TV shows and was a vocal anti-war activist
Donald Sutherland, whose acting career spanned six decades and included starring in such highly acclaimed films as Don’t Look Now, M*A*S*H and The Hunger Games, has died aged 88.
He died in Miami after a long illness, confirmed by his representatives.
Continue reading...Others honoured from cultural world include the writer Monica Ali, choreographer Wayne McGregor and children’s laureate Joseph Coelho
Tracey Emin, the confessional visual artist, and the stage and screen actor Imelda Staunton are among leading figures from the world of culture to be honoured in the king’s birthday honours, both becoming dames.
Emin, who has survived aggressive bladder cancer and opened her own art school as well as embarking on a new body of work since her diagnosis four years ago, said it was a “brilliant surprise”.
Continue reading...Conservative-dominated court restores books denounced by officials as ‘pornographic filth’ to school libraries
An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.
The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”
Continue reading...Text appears to have been copied out and backdated by Camus in 1944, possibly as a way to raise funds during Nazi occupation
A handwritten manuscript of the classic French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus has sold for more than €650,000 (£553,000) at auction, despite bafflement over the reasons for which the Nobel prize-winning author appeared to have faked and backdated it.
The bound, 104-page draft of Camus’s novel about a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab man went under the hammer in Paris on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Former Australian prime minister issues warning that young men’s thinking on the issue is going backward
Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.
Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.
Continue reading...Former Tory minister admits at festival that he felt a fraud due to need to give the impression he was in three places at once
Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart found being a politician “very yucky” and felt like a fraud, he told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.
Asked whether he would consider going back into politics, he said that he found being a politician “personally very, very unpleasant” and “didn’t like it”, adding: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”
Continue reading...Author of novel Prophet Song about an imagined fascist Ireland tells Hay audience he is not a political writer
“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.
“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.
Continue reading...Copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Refugees was due to be returned to Helsinki’s central library month after USSR invaded Finland
A book borrowed from a Helsinki library has been returned – 84 years overdue.
A Finnish translation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical novel Refugees was received by librarian Heini Strand on Monday at the main desk at the Helsinki Central Library Oodi.
Continue reading...Bestselling writer says Lake District sites in new book You Are Here are ‘genuinely all made up’
David Nicholls has warned his fans not to attempt to visit the locations in his new novel. While those who loved the hit Netflix adaptation of Nicholls’ novel One Day have been able to visit locations from the series, such as the Lewisham pizza joint Bella Roma or Charlton Lido, the locations in You Are Here “are genuinely all made up”, the author said.
The novel, which was published last month and follows a midlife couple as they hike through the Lake District, contain a disclaimer from the author explaining that while he has “tried to describe the landscape as accurately as possible, the pubs, hotels and restaurants along the way are all entirely fictional”, and he has also “taken a few small liberties with the route”.
Continue reading...The subversive work of Eliza Haywood, the feminist forerunner of the TV show’s gossip columnist, is about to be republished
She is the real-life Lady Whistledown, an eyebrow-raising female writer who penned a salacious anonymous gossip sheet that skewered 18th-century London society.
Like the fictional pamphlet from Netflix hit Bridgerton, which returned for a third series last week, Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot, published in 1746, has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work.
Continue reading...Book prompts conflict over claims of Métis identity in eastern part of country where group doesn’t have a homeland or deep historic ties
A graphic novel investigating Indigenous identity in Canada has prompted outrage from Métis groups, who say the book undermines their history and represents an attack on their sovereignty.
The work is the result of a third-year history seminar at Dalhousie University, where students collaborated on a book examining thorny questions over ancestry and identity.
Continue reading...Locals hope TV adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude will bring new life to Aracataca, birthplace of author’s magical realism
In sweltering mid-afternoon heat, children splash in the clear water of the canal that threads through town as elderly neighbours look on from rocking chairs on the porches of their sun-washed houses. Butterflies spring from every bush, sometimes fluttering together in kaleidoscopes.
At the foot of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, about 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional world of Macondo lives on.
Continue reading...Freedom: Memories 1954-2021 will cover Merkel’s childhood, political rise and 16 years as German chancellor
Angela Merkel will release her long-awaited memoirs in November under the title Freedom: Memories 1954-2021, sketching her journey from life behind the Berlin Wall to the top echelons of power “more intimately than ever before”.
Merkel, whose image in Germany and abroad has been tarnished by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, will turn 70 in July. She notes that her life can be neatly cleaved into experiences in “two German states – 35 years in the German Democratic Republic, 35 years in reunited Germany”, according to the book’s English publisher, Pan Macmillan.
Continue reading...Bestselling author of Lace and Superwoman turned her attention to helping people overcome anxiety about maths
Shirley Conran, the author of Lace and Superwoman, has died aged 91, her son the designer Jasper Conran has announced.
The bestselling “queen of the bonkbuster” was also the founder of the Maths Anxiety Trust, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to help people who experience anxiety or fear when faced with maths problems. Last week Conran was awarded a damehood in her bed in Charing Cross hospital in London for her services to mathematics education.
Continue reading...The set of folios published by John Gould will be presented at Firsts book fair in London in mid-May
John Gould was one of the most sought-after taxidermists in 19th-century London, commissioned by King George IV to stuff the first giraffe to arrive in England.
But Gould’s lasting legacy is birds. He travelled the world documenting and cataloguing as many avian species as he could find, many of them never seen before, earning him the nickname the Bird Man and the appointment as official “bird stuffer” to the Zoological Society.
Continue reading...