16 April 2021

Anne Enright, Elaine Feeney and Seán Hewitt have made the shortlists of the Dalkey Literary Awards 2021. This is a prestigious awards programme for writers in Ireland that boasts a total prize fund of €30,000, and is presented in conjunction with Zurich Insurance. 

On the Novel of the Year Award shortlist is Anne Enright's Actress (Jonathan Cape), which is the story of a daughter unpicking her famous mother’s life. Shortlisted for the Emerging Writer Award is Feeney's debut fiction As You Were (Harvill Secker), which charts the intimate bonds between the female patients of a dysfunctional hospital ward and the secrets and fears that haunt their sense of self and belonging; and Hewitt's debut poetry collection Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape), which probes weighty themes such as nature, morality, sexuality, relationships, and the body. 

Click here to discover more.

15 April 2021

The 2021 Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Dagger awards longlists have been revealed with Ian Rankin, Kate Summerscale and Denise Mina among the authors chosen. Ian Rankin's A Song for the Dark Times (Orion) is up for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, Kate Summerscale's The Haunting of Alma Fielding (Bloomsbury) for ALCS Gold Dagger, and Denise Mina for Dagger in the Library. 

Nominated by publishers and judged by industry professionals the Dagger Awards represent the best crime writing in the industry. The Crime Writers’ Association was founded in 1953 by John Creasey; its aim to support, promote and celebrate crime writers of both fiction and non-fiction and to promote their work. The CWA Dagger shortlists will be announced in May with the awards ceremony taking place at the start of July. 

Click here to browse the longlists. 

09 April 2021

Abdulrazak Gurnah and Joshua Yaffa have made the longlists for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and for Political Writing 2021, which recognizes the "best book-length political writing being published today, on both international and domestic subjects." Abdulrazak Gurnah is longlisted for his latest novel, Afterlives (Bloomsbury), which focuses on those enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the longlist for Political Writing is Joshua Yaffa's Between Two Fires (Granta), a sparkling analysis which shows how Putinism is built from an accumulation of compromise that leads to corruption. 

In addition to our book category nominees, we are thrilled that Sarah Churchwell, John Harris and Bellingcat have been longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism. Bellingcat are nominated for its work around the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and Russia's clandestine chemical weapons programme; Sarah Churchwell for her contribution to newspapers including the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review; and John Harris for The Guardian video series A...

06 April 2021

Olga Tokarczuk has been longlisted for the European Literature Prize 2021. She is up for the award with the Dutch edition of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which is known in the Netherlands as Jaag je ploeg over de botten van de doden, and is translated from Polish by Charlotte Pothuizen & Dirk Zijlstra. This adds to Tokarczuk's list of recent accolades, which also includes the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, among others.

By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by 'one of Europe's major humanist writers' offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination - and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk's native Poland.

Click here to view the longlist.

01 April 2021

Has creativity been stifled during lockdown? Certainly 2020 was a difficult year for many established writers whose publications were delayed, with bookshops closed and festivals cancelled. But it has been especially difficult for debut writers seeking to get their voices heard...

In direct response to this, a year ahead of schedule, the Deborah Rogers Foundation is bringing forward their biennial Writers Award for first-time writers from 2022 to 2021 and is hereby announcing the 2021 DRF Writers Award opens for submissions on 1st April until 1st July 2021.

Gill Coleridge, Founder of the DRF, says: ‘Deborah was passionate about supporting new writers and so, in the spirit of this prize set up in her memory, we want to help them towards publication now rather than wait another year. I hope this opportunity will help the longlisted and winning writers become as successful as the roll call of previous DRF winners is proving to be.   

‘I am thrilled to have such a distinguished group of Judges on board, chaired by Colm Tóibín and am confident we have an exciting year ahead of us.’

The judges of the 2021 DRF Writers Award will be Colm ...

30 March 2021

Adania Shibli's Minor Detail, which is translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette and published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo, has been longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. The book is split between two interrelated narratives, the latter half following a young woman’s search to discover more about the tragic murder of a Palestinian teenager in 1949, who died the day she was born.

The award aims to encourage more publishing and reading of quality works of imagination from all over the world, and to give greater recognition to the role of translators. Both novels and short-story collections are eligible. The contribution of both author and translator is given equal recognition, with the £50,000 prize split evenly between them. Each shortlisted author and translator also receives £1,000, bringing the total value of the prize to £62,000. The shortlist for the prize will be announced on 22nd April 2021, and the winner announced on 2nd June 2021 in a virtual celebration from Coventry, City of Culture 2021. 

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26 March 2021

Ingrid Persaud and Deepa Anappara are among the debut authors shortlisted for the £2,500 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2021. Ingrid Persaud is shortlisted for Love After Love, which is the story tracing the life of a Trinidadian family over two decades, written in Trinidadian prose; and Deepa Anappara for Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, a novel that draws on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India.

The winning novel will be selected by guest adjudicator Michèle Roberts from a shortlist drawn up by a panel of Authors’ Club members, chaired by Popescu. Inaugurated in 1954, the award is now in its 67th year, and considers any debut novel written in English and published in the UK between 1st January and 31st December 2020. The prize of £2,500 exists to support UK-based authors, publishers and agents, so the novel must originate in the UK and not have been published anywhere else in the world before its UK publication. Last year’s prize was awarded to RCW author Claire Adam.

This year's winner will be announced on Wednesday 19th May.

25 March 2021

Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, which is published by 4th Estate in the UK & Ireland and Alfred A. Knopf in the US, has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2021. The novel explores the painful history of the Apache people and the present immigration crisis on the Southwest border,  while freshly exploring themes of conquest and remembrance, and powerfully conveying the beauty of the haunted landscape.

The judges said: "Interweaving works of literature, music, maps, photographs, and other documents with multiple narrative voices, Luiselli has composed a masterpiece that is at once an exhilarating, lyrical road novel and an unsparing meditation on dislocation, remembering, and storytelling. Timely and timeless, Lost Children Archive is an immersive work that transports, unsettles, and ultimately elevates the reader."

Click here to browse the full shortlist. 

19 March 2021

The shortlist for The British Book Awards 2021 (a.k.a. the Nibbies) has been announced, featuring multiple RCW authors as well as Director Sam Copeland for Literary Agent of the Year. Ian Rankin's A Song for the Dark Times (Orion) is shortlisted for Crime & Thriller Book of the Year, Katie and Kevin Tsang's Dragon Mountain (Simon & Schuster) for Children's Fiction Book of the Year, and Katherine Rundell's edited collection The Book of Hopes (Bloomsbury) for Children's Illustrated & Non-Fiction Book of the Year. 

In addition to our book category nominees, we are thrilled that Director Sam Copeland has been nominated for Literary Agent of the Year. It is the second year in a row that Sam Copeland has been shortlisted for the Nibbies Literary Agent of the Year Award. 

Click here to discover the full shortlists. 

16 March 2021

Two Rivers Media has acquired the film and TV rights to Tanya Byrne’s Afterlove, prior to its publication in July this year. Olivier Award-winning Emma Reeves (My Mum Tracy Beaker) will co-write the screen adaptation with Tanya Byrne, and the production team on Afterlove is led by Two Rivers Media’s Head of Drama, Marcus Wilson (Luther).

Afterlove – Tanya Byrne’s fourth novel for a young adult audience – is a gripping tale of first love with a supernatural twist. It follows 16-year-old Ash Persaud who falls head over heels in love with Poppy Morgan, on a school trip. But their romance is cut tragically short when Ash is hit by a car on New Year’s Eve.  Afterwards, Ash is trapped in the afterlife where she is one of three fierce girl-reapers forced to collect the souls of the city’s dead to be taken to await their fate. But Ash can’t forget her first love and she’s determined to see her again, dead or alive.

Tanya Byrne says: "I knew from my first meeting with Two Rivers that they absolutely understood the story that I am trying to tell with Afterlove and are as committed as I am to translating it to screen as ...

09 March 2021

Netflix's feature film adaptation of John Preston's The Dig, which is about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, has gained five nominations in this year’s BAFTA film awards. It has picked up the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for writer Moira Buffini as well as the nomination for Outstanding British Film. The Dig has also been nominated in three leading technical categories – Best Costume, Best Production Design and Best Hair and Make-Up.

This year's Bafta Film Awards 2021 winners will be announced at a ceremony without a live audience on 11 April. Click here to view the complete shortlist. 

04 March 2021

The Bookseller’s YA Book Prize has revealed its shortlist for 2021, which includes books by Holly Jackson, Alice Oseman and Melinda Salisbury. Holly Jackson is shortlisted for Good Girl, Bad Blood, the follow-up to her award-winning thriller debut A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which sees teen Pip put on her detective hat again when someone she knows goes missing; Alice Oseman for Loveless, which centres on Georgia as she heads to university and starts to question why love seems easier for other people than it does for her; and Melinda Salisbury for Hold Back the Tide, a fantasy horror in which dark forces begin to stir in a small town in the Scottish Highlands.

The recipient of the YA Book Prize 2021 will be announced online on Thursday 6th May, with the winning author scooping £2,000. The award is again partnering with the Hay Festival which, as well as supporting the prize’s social media activity, will host a live event, with the winner in conversation with 2016’s winner and former Irish Children’s Laureate Sarah Crossan. 

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03 March 2021

Elaine Feeney's debut novel As You Were (Harvill Secker) has been chosen as the winner of the Kate O’Brien Award, presented as part of the thirty-seventh Limerick Literary Festival.

Feeney says Kate O’ Brien’s writing and legacy mean a great deal to her—particularly given O’Brien’s history with censorship during her publishing career, and that it is an honour to be given the award.

“I wrote As You Were during recovery after a protracted illness, and my impulse was to write a story about the camaraderie of patients on a hospital ward, to reflect something of the madness, lustre, determination and hilarity of the human condition. 

“Sinéad Hynes, haunted by her abusive past, conceals a devastating diagnosis at the outset of the novel. As You Were hinges on secrets, and perhaps most controversially, is the moral question ‘Has Sinéad the right to conceal the happenings of her own body from those who love her?’ This persuaded me to examine the circumstances by which Sinéad would keep such a devastating secret to herself, the human impulses of fight, flight and ultimately, freeze. Why do we react as we do to trauma, and what d...

02 March 2021

The biennial Writers Award is being brought forward from 2022 to 2021 because of the lockdown.

The DRF Writers Award gives £10,000 to a previously unpublished writer whose submission of 15,000-20,000 words demonstrates talent. The submitted work can be fiction, non-fiction, children’s or short stories. The applicant must be a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Eire.

Details of the Award are as follows:

• Applications should be made after the opening date has been announced via the website www.deborahrogersfoundation.org.
• An award of £10,000 is presented to a first-time prose writer whose submission demonstrates talent and work worthy of publication.  There is a shortlist of three, and the two runners-up each receive £1,000.
• Submissions should take the form of 15,000-20,000 thousand words of a work in progress, fiction or non-fiction.
• Applicants may not be under contract or option to any publisher for any work or title in any language, nor may they be agented.
• Applications are only open to writ...

26 February 2021

Ingrid Persaud and Deepa Anappara are among the debut authors longlisted for the £2,500 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2021. Ingrid Persaud is longlisted for Love After Love, which is the story tracing the life of a Trinidadian family over two decades, written in Trinidadian prose; and Deepa Anappara for Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, a novel that draws on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India.

The winning novel will be selected by guest adjudicator Michèle Roberts from a shortlist drawn up by a panel of Authors’ Club members, chaired by Popescu. Inaugurated in 1954, the award is now in its 67th year, and considers any debut novel written in English and published in the UK between 1st January and 31st December 2020. The prize of £2,500 exists to support UK-based authors, publishers and agents, so the novel must originate in the UK and not have been published anywhere else in the world before its UK publication. Last year’s prize was awarded to RCW author Claire Adam.

This year's winner will be announced on Wednesday 19th May. 

24 February 2021

RCW is very is honoured to be backing the White Review Short Story Prize 2021, which is an annual short story competition for emerging writers. The prize awards £2,500 to the best piece of short fiction by a writer resident in Britain & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal, and is judged by RCW director Laurence Laluyaux alongside Preti Taneja, Tamara Sampey-Jawad, and Skye Arundhati Thomas. The judges will be looking for short stories that explore and expand the possibilities of the form.

In 2013, the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize was won by Claire-Louise Bennett for ‘The Lady of the House,’ and her forthcoming novel Checkout 19 is published by Jonathan Cape in August 2021. Previous winners also include Julia Armfield, Ruby Cowling, Owen Booth, Sophie Mackintosh, Nicole Flattery, Vanessa Onwuemezi and Elizabeth O’Connor. 

We encourage submissions from all literary genres, and there are no restrictions on theme or subject matter. We would only emphasise that the prize was founded to reward ambitious, imaginative and innovative approaches to creative writing.

The winning story will...

19 February 2021

Working Title has optioned the rights to John Preston's new non-fiction book, Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell. The book, published by Viking in the UK and HarperCollins in the US, chronicles the business tycoon’s rise, scandalous fall and untimely death. A Czech immigrant to the UK, Maxwell built a publishing empire, and became an MP, before he was found dead overboard from his yacht in 1991; it was posthumously discovered that he had improperly used funds from the Mirror Publishing group’s pension pot to cover his other companies from bankruptcy. 

Working Title’s Head of Drama Surian Fletcher-Jones will oversee the project’s development as a limited series, which will be produced by the company’s founders Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. John Preston says, "Robert Maxwell is one of the fascinating, complex figures of the 20th Century and I think Working Title are the perfect people to turn it into a television series."