18 June 2024

Jon Ronson has written a new immersive theatre project, Life and Trust, that opened in New York's Financial District on the 17th of June 2024. 

Find out more here:

Life And Trust | Experience a Tale of Money, Sex & Power (lifeandtrustnyc.com)

24 April 2024

Anne Enright and Isabella Hammad are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. Irish author Anne Enright, who has been shortlisted for the prize twice, is shortlisted for a third time for The Wren, The Wren (Jonathan Cape), while British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad is shortlisted for her second novel, Enter Ghost (Vintage), which is about a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.

The winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced on Thursday 13th June 2024 at the Women’s Prize Trust’s summer party in central London, along with the inaugural winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. The winner will receive a cheque for £30,000, anonymously endowed, along with a limited-edition bronze statuette known as the "Bessie", created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.

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22 April 2024

Pari Thomson has been named the Overall Winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for her debut, the illustrated magical door fantasy Greenwild: The World Behind The Door (Macmillan Children’s Books), illustrated by Elisa Paganelli.

The prize is voted for by Waterstones booksellers and is now in its 20th year. The winner receives £5,000 and the promise of ongoing commitment to their writing and illustrating career. 

“Pari Thomson’s debut enchanted our booksellers with its sweeping escapism and standard-setting lyrical world-building," commented Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones. "At once a fast-paced adventure story and a heartfelt entreaty to care for the natural world, Greenwild is a timeless fantasy tale of friendship, mystery, and the magic and beauty to be found in nature."

Pari Thomson, who is also editorial director for picture books at Bloomsbury Children’s Books, added: “I am lucky enough to live near Kew Gardens in London, a place full of sparkling glasshouses and carnivorous plants and lily pads big enough to take a nap on. I have always felt that nature was a little bit magic — and Kew made me ask, what if it w...

20 March 2024

Debut novelist Tom Crewe has been named winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for The New Life (Chatto & Windus), a novel described by judge James McConnachie as “thrillingly intimate” and “a compassionate and tenderly sensual account of masculine sexuality”. 

The New Life is set in 1894 while the Oscar Wilde trial is igniting public outcry, “and everything John and Henry have longed for is suddenly under threat,” the synopsis says. “United by a shared vision, the two begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.” 

Judge Johanna Thomas-Corr, chief literary critic for the Times and Sunday Times, said: “Sometimes a début novel comes along that feels like an immediate classic – a book that you suddenly can’t imagine not existing. If you’ve read Tom Crewe’s bold and beautifully observed début, The New Life, you’ll know that it is just such a book. He is a writer of rare promise.”

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20 March 2024

Paul Murray has won the £30,000 inaugural Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year for The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton), described as “a gripping saga of one highly dysfunctional family that asks if a single moment of bad luck – a patch of ice on the road, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can change the direction of a life”. Chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo presented Murray with the prize, describing The Bee Sting as a “wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding, against a background of Ireland’s economic and social crisis of the late Noughties”.  

Receiving the award Paul Murray said: "what an incredible honour, I’m really speechless" and, visibly emotional, dedicated the award to his father, who is unwell at the moment and wasn’t able to make the ceremony. He told journalists: "It’s the first Nero Prize [...] so there will never be another first winner, so that’s really wonderful and it’s a tremendous honour."

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20 March 2024

Anne Enright has won the fiction category in this year’s Writers’ Prize, formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize, at a ceremony at the London Book Fair for The Wren, The Wren (Jonathan Cape), a meditation on love and the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.

A statement read on her behalf said: "It’s lovely to be voted for as opposed to judged, don’t ask me why, it just feels simpler, broader, more robust. I look at the list of members in the Folio Society and realise my novel was brought to the attention of some of the writers whose work I admire most. And indeed that might have been enough."

Open to all works of literature, regardless of form, the award is the only international, English-language award nominated and judged purely by other writers. This year’s shortlists — which were revealed in January — and winners were decided entirely by the Folio Academy, made up of more than 350 writers. Previously known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, the award relaunched last year as The Writers’ Prize.

20 March 2024

The shortlist for The British Book Awards 2024, also known as the Nibbies, has been announced. Chris van Tulleken is shortlisted in the Non-Fiction: Lifestyle & Illustrated category for his debut Ultra-Processed People (Cornerstone Press); Alice Oseman is shortlisted in the Children's Illustrated category for Heartstopper Volume 5 (Hachette Children's Books); Katherine Rundell and A.F. Steadman are both shortlisted in the Children's Fiction Book of the Year category for Impossible Creatures (Bloomsbury) and Skandar and the Phantom Rider (Simon & Schuster) respectively; and Katherine Rundell is shortlisted again in the Audiobook Fiction category with Impossible Creatures narrated by Samuel West, alongside the audiobook edition for Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, narrated by Russ Bain and Kathryn Drysdale (published by W.F. Howes).

​The 12 category winners, and the winner of Overall Book of the Year, will be unveiled at a ceremony at Grosvenor House London on Monday 13th May. The category awards will be nominated by separate panels, with judges including Toby Jones, Nihal Arthanayake, Lorraine Kelly, Adrian Chiles and Yink...

20 March 2024

Noreen Masud and Yan Ge are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Jhalak Prize. Noreen Masud is longlisted for her book A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton), a memoir that weaves reflections on Britain’s flatlands with poetry, history and insightful meditation on loss, identity and trauma, and Yan Ge for her English language debut, Elsewhere (Faber), which delves into themes of isolation through nine stories spanning from contemporary to ancient times, from China to Dublin to London and Stockholm, depicting strange and beguiling stories of dispossession, longing, and the diasporic experience.

The two Jhalak Prize awards celebrate writing by British/British resident BAME writers and annually award £1,000 to the winners. The shortlist for both awards will be announced on 18th April, with the winners revealed on 30th May.

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20 March 2024

Renowned Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has been announced as the recipient of the prestigious Spanish Formentor international literary award 2024. The five-member jury praised the Hungarian writer’s “maintenance of a narrative force that envelops, reveals, conceals and transforms the reality of the world,” his ability to build fascinating labyrinths of literary imagination, and his detailed, slow-paced style, which “reflects the creative energy of a literature completely alien to the industrial influence of entertainment.” 

The Formentor Literature Prize was established in 1961, to recognize the quality and integrity of works that consolidate the prestige and cultural impact of literature. Among the winners in the first years were, for instance, Samuel Beckett of Ireland and Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina. After a break of several decades, the prize was revived in 2011, and has been awarded to authors such as Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux of France, Ludmilla Ulickaya of Russia, and last year, to Pascal Quignard of France.

Several of László Krasznahorkai's notable works, including Tango Satánico, War and War, and Melancolía de la re...