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09 September 2025

Lawrence Osborne's novel The Ballad of a Small Player adapted into film starring Colin Farrell

Lawrence Osborne's 2014 novel, The Ballad of a Small Player has been adapted into a film, Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger, starring Colin Farrell. The film premiered at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival in August 2025, and will be released in cinemas in mid-October before streaming on Netflix at the end of October. 

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27 August 2025

Julia Donaldson makes history!

Julia Donaldson has become the first writer to sell more than 50 million units through British bookshops since accurate records began!

Donaldson and her illustrators have now shifted 50.3 million copies via NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

Donaldson’s bestseller is her and illustrator Axel Scheffler’s 1999 paperback edition of The Gruffalo (Macmillan Children’s), which has sold just under 1.5 million copies. She has two other editions that have exceeded one million units (both illustrated by Scheffler and published by Macmillan Children’s): The Gruffalo’s Child and Room on the Broom. All of Donaldson’s top 10 bestsellers have been collaborations with Axel Scheffler. Various versions of the two Gruffalo titles account for nearly 20% of Donaldson’s total, a percentage that may increase in Autumn 2026 when the third title in the series is set to be launched.

 

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25 July 2025

Lucy Steeds wins the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

The Artist by Lucy Steeds has won the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. 

The book is set over one sweltering summer during the 1920s, and focuses on an enigmatic painter, the young British journalist set on penning a piece on him, and the artist’s seemingly unworldly niece. As the young man sets out to write his piece on the great and terrifying painter, tensions between the three come to a dramatic conclusion.

Bea Carvalho, Waterstones head of books, said: “It is a great pleasure to announce that Waterstones booksellers have chosen Lucy Steeds as the winner of the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for her novel The Artist. From a shortlist of six stunning books, The Artist stood out for its atmospheric, sensory prose, and its headily evocative sense of time and place. It is a stylish, elegant treat of a novel which seamlessly transports the reader to sun-soaked southern France, weaving mystery with romance, while delving into the complex nature of artistry. Lucy Steeds is a writer of rare talent: she is able to conjure vivid brushstrokes, sticky heat, and the smells and tastes of Provence, through words on the page. This is a gorgeously claus...

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