Adrienne Vaughan was on family holiday and reportedly fell overboard when speedboat collided with a sailboat
Adrienne Vaughan, the 45-year-old president of the US branch of the Bloomsbury publishing house, has been killed after a collision between a speedboat and a 45-metre sailboat on Italy’s Amalfi coast.
Vaughan was on holiday in Italy with her husband and two children when the collision happened on Thursday.
Continue reading...Previously nominated authors Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray join 13-strong field including four debuts
• Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth
A longlist of 13 “original and thrilling” books offering “startling portraits of the current” are in contention for the 2023 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award.
The longlist features four debut novelists and six others who have been longlisted for the first time, alongside Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray, who have seven previous Booker nominations between them.
Continue reading...Decision comes as lawmakers in conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books
Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled on Saturday.
US district judge Timothy L Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by the state’s Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, earlier this year, was set to take effect on 1 August.
Continue reading...Hollywood films vying for Golden Lion include Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, with non-competition films by Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater
The Venice film festival appears to have largely shrugged off issues caused by non-attendance of Hollywood actors due to the Sag-Aftra strike as it unveiled its lineup for its 2023 edition.
Venice has traditionally functioned partly as a platform for major American releases looking for strong positioning in the autumn awards season, and it has already seen its originally announced opening film Challengers, a tennis drama starring Zendaya, drop out after it was forced to delay its release date.
Continue reading...The 23-year-old was arrested at Balmain police station and charged with one count of use carriage service to menace, harass or offend
Police have arrested a man who allegedly threatened author Yumi Stynes, the co-author of an educational book aimed at helping teenagers understand sex and sexuality that was recently removed from shelves at Big W after staff members were abused.
Stynes – co-author of Welcome to Sex: Your No-silly Questions Guide to Sexuality, Pleasure and Figuring it Out – has reported receiving death threats and violent, graphic, racist abuse from critics of her book.
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Continue reading...Publisher of Welcome to Sex by Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes defends book after conservative campaigners claim it is ‘teaching sex to children’
The publisher of a sex education and consent book aimed at adolescents has defended the title after it was taken off the shelves of Big W stores amid backlash from conservative campaigners.
Welcome to Sex, co-authored by the former Dolly Doctor and adolescent health expert Dr Melissa Kang and feminist writer Yumi Stynes, is the fourth book in a series on topics such as consent and menstruation.
Continue reading...Former president writes open letter to American librarians and appears in TikTok video decrying rightwing censorship push
In an open letter to American librarians, Barack Obama criticised “profoundly misguided” rightwing efforts to ban books from libraries in public schools.
“Some of the books that shaped my life – and the lives of so many others – are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives,” the former president wrote.
Continue reading...Marcel Pagnol based his famous movies on a Provencal manor he’d known as a child. Now his legacy is at risk, says his grandson
In 1941 the French novelist, playwright and film-maker Marcel Pagnol bought a chateau in a Provençal valley outside Marseille on the advice of his solicitor without even seeing it.
He proposed to transform the property into a “cinema city”, a French Hollywood set in the hills and lavender fields of southern France where he had holidayed as a child.
Continue reading...Heartstopper by Alice Oseman was on shelves for young people and did not have closed packaging as required by controversial law
A government office in Hungary has levied a hefty fine against a national bookseller over a LGBTQ+ graphic novel series, saying it violated a contentious law that prohibits the depiction of homosexuality to minors.
The bookseller, Líra Könyv, is Hungary’s second-largest bookstore chain. It was fined 12m forints ($36,000 or £27,400) for placing Heartstopper by the British author Alice Oseman in its youth literature section, and for failing to place it in closed packaging as required by a 2021 law.
Continue reading...Libri bows to pressure to comply with ‘child protection’ law after takeover by foundation linked to PM
Hungary’s largest bookseller has started wrapping books that feature LGBTQ+ characters in plastic to prevent customers from opening them in stores after it was taken over by a private foundation with close ties to Viktor Orbán.
Libri, which is also the country’s largest publisher, said in an email that the packaging was a request from the Hungarian consumer protection authority to follow the controversial “child protection” law that came into force in 2021.
Continue reading...Barbers on Strike, author Michelle Recinos’s collection of short stories, has apparently upset strongman president Nayib Bukele
First the soldiers came for those with mohawks. Then they came for the hairdressers themselves.
“They were good kids,” quips the narrator in one of the latest tales by the Salvadorian author Michelle Recinos, “although I’d never trusted them with my hair.”
Continue reading...Victoria Police says Christophe Glasl was not in Tasmania at the time of Port Arthur massacre, despite his claim to have been involved in its resolution
A publisher has pulled a former police officer’s memoir after the force questioned his claim he attended the Port Arthur massacre.
Hachette confirmed parts of the book Special Operations Group by former Victorian police officer Christophe Glasl were inaccurate, and that it had been removed from shelves.
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Continue reading...Mattel says the Barney movie will be inspired by Charlie Kaufman, while Barbie director Greta Gerwig is planning two Narnia movies for Netflix
The Daniel Kaluuya-produced movie featuring Barney the Dinosaur will be an “adult”, “surrealistic” and “A24-type” film inspired by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, it has been revealed.
In a wide-ranging report on the film-making plans of toymaker Mattel in the New Yorker, Mattel Films executive Kevin McKeon said of the project: “We’re leaning into the millennial angst of the property rather than fine-tuning this for kids. It’s really a play for adults. Not that it’s R-rated, but it’ll focus on some of the trials and tribulations of being thirtysomething, growing up with Barney – just the level of disenchantment within the generation.”
Continue reading...Like any author, translators want to receive credit for their work instead of being treated as an afterthought
They have often been overlooked in the artistic and literary process, but translators have long claimed they have the power to change everything.
There are tales of myths being born, societies being forged and cities destroyed with just a slip of the pen, such as the supposed translation error that allegedly led to the US deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or the speculation about life on Mars after the mistranslation of an Italian astronomer.
Continue reading...Author who had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion was hospitalised with skull fractures after Tuesday’s missile strike
An award-winning Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week has died, the freedom of expression group PEN has said.
Victoria Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including four children, and wounding dozens.
Continue reading...Widow of great Argentinian writer did not leave a will, which put the rights in limbo
A court has granted the rights to the works of the late Jorge Luis Borges, considered Argentina’s most internationally significant author of the 20th century, to five nephews of the author’s widow, who died in March.
Borges’s wife, María Kodama, had devoted much of her life to fiercely protecting his legacy and it surprised many in Argentina’s literary circle that she did not leave a will, even though she had breast cancer.
Continue reading...New manuscript offers insight into the painstaking work of writer’s seemingly effortless storytelling in true crime classic
The opening words are not quite there, but the essence Truman Capote is striving for already soars from the page as he conjures up the vision of a small community in the heartlands of America where terrible events are soon to unfold.
“Holcomb is a very visible village,” the passage begins, captured in the author’s tight, almost crabby handwriting, “located on high wheat plains of western Kansas, where the air is Swiss-clear and the flat views lonesomely, awesomely extensive.”
In Cold Blood, the manuscript by Truman Capote, is published by SP Books and available here.
Continue reading...Five first-time nominees are among the six authors competing for $60,000 award for novels that ‘present Australian life in any of its phases’
Five first-time nominees – including a debut novelist – are among the six authors shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin award, Australia’s highest literary honour.
Announced on Tuesday, the six books up for the $60,000 prize are Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, Yumna Kassab’s The Lovers, Fiona Kelly McGregor’s Iris, Shankari Chandran’s Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens, and Kgshak Akec’s Hopeless Kingdom.
Continue reading...Fallout from Covid crisis has left event struggling financially after last year’s ‘traumatic’ fall in sales
The Edinburgh International book festival hopes a swathe of Booker prize winners, political leaders and a guest appearance by Greta Thunberg will help restore its finances after a “traumatic” fall in sales last year.
The world’s largest book festival celebrates its 40th anniversary in August with events featuring Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Icelandic prime minister, the former Booker winners Ben Okri and Anne Enright, and the International Booker winners Georgi Gospodinov and David Diop.
Continue reading...Writer of Empireland, which examined Britain’s imperial past, says culture war-fuelled online trolling and heckling ‘gets to you’
The writer Sathnam Sanghera has said he barely ever does public events in the UK because of a fear of being attacked amid a culture war-fuelled backlash over his views on Britain’s imperial past, saying he feared a Florida-style push towards the banning of books.
Sanghera, a journalist and author whose bestselling book Empireland assessed how the UK’s colonial territories still infect contemporary politics and discourse, said he had begun to dread holding book events here.
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