Author of Manon Bradshaw detective series was diagnosed with a brain tumour three years ago
The novelist and former Guardian journalist Susie Steiner, known for the Manon Bradshaw detective series, has died aged 51.
A tweet posted from her account on Sunday said: “Susie died yesterday after being diagnosed with a brain tumour three years ago. She lived with her illness with courage and good humour. She was much loved and will be much missed.”
Continue reading...Courtroom battle looms as author argues her book revealing inspiration for character became basis of an American novel
Two authors are to go head to head in the high court in London this week in a bitter literary plagiarism row that revolves around the love life one of the most romantic of all heroines, Lara Antipova from the Russian epic Dr Zhivago.
British author Anna Pasternak, a descendant of the Russian author of the original novel, will argue in court that substantial sections of her own factual account of the real-life inspiration for the character of Lara have since been copied and exploited in an American novel.
Continue reading...Glastonbury makes me revel in my sprung mattress from where I can watch RMT boss Mick Lynch dressing down media pundits
Hurrah! After an enforced three-year hiatus (there was this pandemic thing – I can’t get into it now) Glastonbury is back! The older I get, the more I love this music festival of music festivals, its noise, its mud, its people. The knowledge that I don’t have to endure any of it gets sweeter with every passing year. The sheer Jomo of it all far outpaces the delights of birthdays (they start to pall once you’re past seven and I’ve had 40 of them since then) and even Christmas (so much work now that I have a child of my own and can’t slip into a mimosas-bellinis-prosecco stupor over the course of the day).
Continue reading...A self-published novel by Michael Winkler joins Alice Pung, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Michelle de Kretser and Jennifer Down to compete for $60,000
A self-published book has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin for the first time in the award’s 65-year history, with Michael Winkler’s cult hit Grimmish clearing the final hurdle before Australia’s most prestigious literary prize is announced on 20 July.
Announced on Thursday evening, Grimmish joins Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters, Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light and Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days to compete for the $60,000 prize.
Continue reading...Robertson might be tiny but for poet and schoolteacher Peter Ramm, it is the secret weapon that helped him win the UK’s biggest prize for unpublished poetry
Robertson is a small, pretty town perched on the edge of the New South Wales southern highlands, almost teetering on the escarpment that falls away to the Illawarra and Shoalhaven coasts.
It is most famous as the home of The Big Potato – an appropriately tuber-shaped concrete monolith on the main street – and a triumphant rugby league team called the Spuddies.
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Continue reading...Australian author denies he is a plagiarist and says he has been ‘influenced by the greats’ of literature
The Australian novelist John Hughes, who last week admitted to “unintentionally” plagiarising parts of a Nobel laureate’s novel, appears to have also copied without acknowledgment parts of The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina and other classic texts in his new book The Dogs.
The revelation of new similarities follows an investigation by Guardian Australia which resulted in Hughes’ 2021 novel being withdrawn from the longlist of the $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award.
Continue reading...Exclusive: The Dogs by John Hughes withdrawn from $60,000 prize after novelist admits he used parts of nonfiction work of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich ‘without realising’
Australia’s most prestigious books prize, the Miles Franklin literary award, has pulled The Dogs by John Hughes from its 2022 longlist, a day after Hughes apologised for plagiarising parts of the work of a Nobel laureate “without realising” in his acclaimed novel.
Following a Guardian Australia investigation that uncovered 58 similarities and instances of identical text between parts of Hughes’ 2021 novel The Dogs and the 2017 English translation of Svetlana Alexievich’s nonfiction The Unwomanly Face of War, Hughes apologised to Alexievich and her translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky “for using their words without acknowledgment”.
Continue reading...Two previously unseen short stories by Jackson, rated by Stephen King as one of the great horror fiction writers, are to appear in US magazine the Strand
Two previously unpublished short stories by Shirley Jackson, the queen of gothic fiction, have been released.
Charlie Roberts and Only Stand and Wait were both published on 9 June in Strand magazine, a US-based print magazine that publishes short fiction and interviews.
Continue reading...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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.
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