Category Archives: Books

‘Unflinching’ debut written ‘for something to do’ during lockdown wins top book prize

Posted on by

Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue wins book of the year and literary fiction category at Australian Book Industry Association’s annual awards in Sydney

First Nations writers and female authors have dominated the 2022 Australian Book Industry Association’s (Abia) annual awards, with a debut novel by one of the nation’s most promising young writers taking out top honours.

Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue won the Abia book of the year and literary fiction book of the year at a ceremony in Sydney on Thursday night. Judges praised the novel as “a darkly funny yet unflinching glimpse of early adulthood”. In her review for Guardian Australia, Zoya Patel praised Love & Virtue as “a multilayered page-turner on power, unrequited love and campus rape culture, wrapped in a coming-of-age narrative”.

Continue reading...

Praise be: unburnable copy of The Handmaid’s Tale fetches $130,000

Posted on by

The special edition of Margaret Atwood’s novel was auctioned by Sotheby’s and is made of Cinefoil, a treated aluminum product

A specially commissioned, unburnable edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been auctioned for $130,000, Sotheby’s announced Tuesday.

Proceeds will be donated to PEN America, which advocates for free expression worldwide. The 384-page book consists mainly of Cinefoil, a specially treated aluminum product, and was announced last month at PEN’s annual fundraising gala.

Continue reading...

Bernardine Evaristo fears publishers may lose interest in black authors

Posted on by

Diversity in book industry must be sustained, and start at the top, Booker prize-winning author tells Hay festival

The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo says she fears that publishers’ interest in black authors may be only a “trend or fashion” that could wane unless the business becomes more diverse.

Evaristo, who was the first black woman to win the literary prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other in 2019, said that the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd in 2020 “really did shake the industry to the core” and had marked a turning point in previously “excluded” authors getting book deals.

Continue reading...

Elif Shafak: there’s a scream building up in young people

Posted on by

Author cites Brexit and the climate crisis as examples of previous generations ‘breaking’ their future

The author Elif Shafak has said she thinks “there’s a scream building up” inside many young people, because they feel their future “is being shaped by older generations”.

“It’s difficult to be young, in this age in particular,” the Turkish-British novelist told the Hay festival. “It’s their future that’s been broken by previous generations,” she said, citing Brexit and the climate emergency.

Continue reading...

‘Tragically ugly’ school textbook causes social media outcry in China

Posted on by

Education ministry orders publisher to rectify illustrations of children deemed inappropriate

China’s education ministry has ordered a state-owned publisher to rectify a school textbook that went viral owing to what social media users described as “tragically ugly” and inappropriate depictions of children.

The mathematics books published by the People’s Education Press contain illustrations of people with distorted faces and bulging pants. Boys are seen grabbing girls’ skirts and one child appears to have a leg tattoo.

Continue reading...

Jacqueline Wilson: my mother slept with a gun under her pillow

Posted on by

Children’s author says she told her elderly mother to get rid of it as she was terrified of being mistakenly shot

The children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson has said her elderly mother slept with a gun beneath her pillow.

Wilson, creator of the Tracy Beaker series, told an audience at the Hay festival in Wales that she was daughter of a character more colourful than any she had written – and that she was terrified her mother might shoot her by accident, and persuaded her to get rid of it.

Continue reading...

Monica Ali ‘terrified’ of writing sex scenes in new novel

Posted on by

Brick Lane author says fear of winning Bad Sex award loomed over writing of latest book, Love Marriage

The Brick Lane author Monica Ali has said she was “terrified” to write the sex scenes in her most recent novel, Love Marriage, with the fear of being nominated for the Bad Sex awards looming over her as she wrote.

In an event at the Hay festival in Wales, the 54-year-old writer told the audience: “There’s all sorts of pitfalls to writing sex scenes – you might end up using words like ‘throbbing’, ‘thrusting’, ‘member’”.

Continue reading...

How to Murder Your Husband writer found guilty of murdering husband

Posted on by

Portland jury finds Nancy Crampton Brophy guilty of killing chef Daniel Brophy in June 2018

A jury in the US city of Portland has convicted a self-published romance novelist who wrote an essay titled How to Murder Your Husband of fatally shooting her husband four years ago.

The jury of seven women and five men found Nancy Crampton Brophy, 71, guilty of second-degree murder on Wednesday after deliberating for two days over Daniel Brophy’s death, according to reports.

Continue reading...

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was about liberalism, not totalitarianism, claims Moscow diplomat

Posted on by

Maria Zakharova says idea book is about totalitarianism is ‘one of the biggest global fakes’, in claim disputed by Russian translator

George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four was written to describe the dangers of western liberalism – not totalitarianism - a top Moscow diplomat has claimed.

“For many years we believed that Orwell described the horrors of totalitarianism. This is one of the biggest global fakes … Orwell wrote about the end of liberalism. He depicted how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end,” Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry, said during a public talk in Ekaterinburg on Saturday.

Continue reading...

Author Mario Vargas Llosa backs Bolsonaro over Lula in Brazil election

Posted on by

Peruvian writer criticises incumbent’s ‘clowning around’ but says he is still preferable to former president

The Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, Latin America’s most eminent living chronicler of power and corruption, has declared a preference for Jair Bolsonaro over Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as Brazil prepares to head to the polls later this year.

The 86-year-old Peruvian writer, who also holds Spanish citizenship, revealed his thoughts on October’s election during a talk in Uruguay on Wednesday.

Continue reading...

Whiti Hereaka wins New Zealand’s Ockham fiction prize for novel subverting Māori myth

Posted on by

Kurangaituku, 'an epic poem of a novel’, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn prize at a ceremony that delivered ‘loads of surprises’

A novel subverting a Māori myth has taken home New Zealand’s most prestigious writing prize at this year’s Ockham New Zealand book awards.

Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka, which draws on the Māori legend of Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman but tells it from the perspective of the tale’s traditional monster Kurangaituku, has won the $60,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction.

Continue reading...

Writer’s essay on why she plagiarized her book removed for … plagiarism

Posted on by

Jumi Bello’s essay was briefly published on the Literary Hub website until it was revealed she had again lifted material

An author’s online essay on why she used plagiarized material in a novel pulled earlier this year has itself been removed after editors found she had again lifted material.

Jumi Bello’s essay, I Plagiarized Parts of My Debut Novel. Here’s Why appeared just briefly Monday on the website Literary Hub. Bello’s debut novel, The Leaving had been scheduled to come out in July, but was cancelled in February by Riverhead Books.

Continue reading...

Washington Post wins public service Pulitzer for Capitol attack coverage

Posted on by

Paper beat out two other finalists, the New York Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Washington Post has won the 2022 Pulitzer prize for public service journalism, for The Attack, its account of the deadly assault on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021.

The paper beat two other finalists: the New York Times, for challenging official accounts of US military engagements in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for an exposé of electrical fires in city rental operations.

Continue reading...

Tortured to death: the 14 Cypriot men killed by British in 50s uprising

Posted on by

Book reveals fate of EOKA guerrilla fighters at the hands of the army during the dying days of empire on the Mediterranean island

At least 14 Cypriots were tortured then murdered by UK forces during an armed uprising in the late 1950s, according to newly unearthed evidence that raises fresh questions over another shocking chapter of Britain’s colonial history.

Testimony from British veterans and Cypriot rebel fighters, along with postmortem and morgue records, as well as previously undisclosed material from Cypriot archives, suggest that the victims died after being interrogated by UK officers. The dead, all men aged between 17 and 37, were arrested on suspicion of being part of the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, a paramilitary organisation known as EOKA, which orchestrated a guerrilla campaign to overthrow British control in Cyprus.

Continue reading...

Trump sought strike on top Iran military figure for political reasons – Esper book

Posted on by

Robert O’Brien told top general shortly before 2020 election that Trump wanted to kill unnamed official, according to Esper memoir

Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, “stunned” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by saying the president wanted to kill a senior Iranian military officer operating outside the Islamic Republic.

“This was a really bad idea with very big consequences,” Mark Esper, Trump’s second and last secretary of defense, writes in his new memoir, adding that Gen Mark Milley suspected O’Brien saw the strike purely in terms of Trump’s political interests.

Continue reading...

Rare ‘Wicked’ bible that encourages adultery discovered in New Zealand

Posted on by

First copy of the 1631 bible, which mistakenly reads ‘thou shalt commit adultery’, to be found in the southern hemisphere

An extremely rare bible famous for an unfortunate error that encourages adultery has been discovered in New Zealand.

The 1631 “Wicked” Bible, as it has become known, omits the word “not” from its seventh commandment, informing readers “thou shalt commit adultery”. One thousand copies of the text, which also came to be known as the Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible, were printed, with the error only discovered a year later.

Continue reading...

Ian Fleming’s lost James Bond screenplay reveals a very different 007

Posted on by

With no Moneypenny and no M, a previously unpublished script reveals the author’s original ideas for Moonraker

In the action-packed film Moonraker, James Bond escapes from Jaws, the metal-toothed villain, on a hang-glider that ejects from a speedboat just as he drives over the precipice of a waterfall. It is one of numerous outlandish scenes in the film that Ian Fleming never wrote in his original 007 novel. And it could not be more different to the author’s own version of the film, according to a previously unpublished script.

In 1956, a year after the Moonraker novel was published, Fleming wrote his own 150-page film treatment with a plot that is as serious as the 1979 film is lightweight, despite Roger Moore’s charm as the fictional spy.

Continue reading...

Barcelona honours Gabriel García Márquez with new library

Posted on by

The Colombian Nobel laureate, who lived in the city from 1967-75, is to have a €12m building specialising in Latin American literature named after him

In the digital age, building a new library filled with old-fashioned printed books seems idealistic, almost quixotic.Not so in Barcelona. The city council is about to open a new €12m (£10m) library next month, the latest instalment in a programme that dates back 20 years.

The library, in the working-class district of Sant Martí de Provençals, has been named in honour of the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.

Continue reading...

Gay references removed from Fantastic Beasts 3 for Chinese release

Posted on by

Big-budget fantasy sequel has had six seconds cut, as Warner Bros releases statement to say ‘the spirit of the film remains intact’

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has been edited for release in China to ensure any gay references have been removed.

The fantasy sequel, which has an estimated budget of $200m, contains allusions to a romantic history between the characters of Dumbledore and Grindelwald, played by Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen respectively. Six seconds of dialogue, including the lines “Because I was in love with you” and “The summer Gellert and I fell in love”, were taken out for the Chinese release on 8 April.

Continue reading...