31 January 2020

Following hugely successful and sell-out seasons in Dublin and New York City, the critically acclaimed production of Sebastian Barry’s On Blueberry Hill is set to open at London’s Trafalgar Studios on 5 March for a strictly limited season until 2 May 2020.

Directed by Fishamble’s Jim Culleton, this new play is bursting with humanity, as it explores forgiveness, survival and, ultimately, love. The play, written by Sebastian Barry and directed by Jim Culleton, features best of friends and worst of enemies Christy (Niall Buggy) and PJ (David Ganly), who are destined to share their lives for twenty years. As the two men reflect on the hope and torment of life outside - they slowly uncover the events that have led them to their world with explosive, bittersweet consequences.

Click here to book tickets. 

31 January 2020

Nick Hornby's State of the Union triumphed the short-form series Emmy categories, winning for Short Form Comedy or Drama Series in the Creative Arts Emmy awards, followed by Actress and Actor in Short Form Comedy or Drama Awards for its stars Rosamund Pike and Chris O'Dowd. This is a remarkable victory for State of the Union, especially considering that it wasn't even listed as a nominee at first.

The short comedy, which follows a couple meeting in a pub before couples counseling and discussing their troubled marriage, was written by Nick Hornby and directed by Stephen Frears. It ran for ten, 10-minute episodes on SundanceTV and on BBC2 in 2019, and the full series is now available to watch on SundanceTV and BBC iPlayer.

28 January 2020

Valeria Luiselli’s novel Faces in the Crowd, the award-winning story of a mother snatching brief moments to write a book based on memories of her younger, pre-parenthood life in New York, has been adapted for stage by director Ellen McDougall at The Gate Theatre in London. The play opened on January 16th and closes on 8th February 2020 and was listed in the top five best shows to see in The Guardian on 18th January. Starring are Anoushka Luca, Jimena Larraguivel, Neil D'Souza and Santiago Huertas Ruiz.

Faces in the Crowd was originally titled Los ingrávidos, and was translated from from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney in 2014.

Click here to learn more about the play.

28 January 2020

The American Library Association (ALA) has awarded Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, published by Alfred A. Knopf in the US, as the winner of the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Established by the American Library Association in 2012, the Carnegie Medals for Excellence serve as an ALA guide to help adult readers select quality material and reflects the expert judgment of library professionals and booksellers.

Luiselli's Lost Children Archive is also up for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle and was among the titles selected as the Best Book of 2019 by Barack Obama, the New York Times, The Guardian, TIME magazine and more. 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.

27 January 2020

Ian Rankin was inducted into the 21st Century Hall of Fame at Nielsen's annual Bestseller Award Ceremony on 23rd January 2020, having his lifetime sales reaching significant official milestones. In particular, he has achieved combined lifetime sales of 9.7m in print and 1.6m in e-books. His most popular books are Doors Open, ​selling over 325k print copies, and ​Saints of the Shadow Bible​ which has sold over 158k e-books.

While accepting his award, Rankin recalled how his first novel had been remaindered, and that it had been a long process to get first into the top 10 chart, and then to attain the number one spot itself, advising new or midlist writers to "stick in there".

Westwind, the espionage thriller which has been out of print since its first edition of just 1,000 copies in 1990, is currently still storming the bestseller list months after its republication by Orion in November 2019. 

24 January 2020

Misbehaviour, a story by Rebecca Frayn, is set to hit screens across the UK this spring. The film is directed by Philippa Lowthorpe (The Other Boleyn Girl), and is produced by BAFTA nominee Suzanne Mackie (The Crown, Calendar Girls) and by Sarah-Jane Wheale. Starring are Kiera Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jessie Buckley, Greg Kinnear, Lesley Manville, Keeley Hawes, Rhys Ifans, and Phyllis Logan. The film is a Pathé, BBC Films, Ingenious Media, BFI (using funds from the National Lottery) presentation of a Left Bank Pictures Production.

Frayn's Misbehaviour is a dramedy based on the true story of the 1970 Miss World contest and its disruption by the newly founded Women’s Liberation Movement. There was further uproar when the winner turned out to be Miss Grenada, the first black woman ever to be crowned Miss World. In a matter of hours, a global audience had witnessed the patriarchy driven from the stage and the Western ideal of beauty turned on its head.

Click here to watch the trailer. 

24 January 2020

Alexander Masters is this year’s winner of the Biographers' Club Prize for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography.

Alexander Masters’ prize-winning Stuart: A Life Backwards, is the story of Stuart Shorter, a homeless man living in Cambridge. This bestselling biography created a lot of buzz when it was first published by 4th Estate in 2005, winning the Guardian First Book Award and Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 in the Biography category. He also adapted his book into a television program for the BBC and HBO, starring Tom Hardy as Shorter and Benedict Cumberbatch as Masters.

23 January 2020

As Bologna Book Fair approaches, RCW are celebrating the publication of Katherine Rundell’s five novels in 33 international territories. Last Bologna, Katherine’s first novel, The Girl Savage (Capriole Sotto il Temporale in Italian, translated by Mara Pace) was in the running for the book fair’s Strega Ragazze e Ragazzi prize, adding that shortlisting to her Le Prix Sorcières Award in France for The Rooftoppers (Le Ciel Nous Appartient, translated by Emmanuelle Ghez), the Costa Children's Book Award in the UK for The Explorer and the Boston Globe-Horn Award in the US for The Girl Savage.

Rundell’s latest novel, The Good Thieves – a 1920s New York heist orchestrated by the brilliantly fierce Vita to rightfully take back her grandfather’s stolen house – is up for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2020, Astrid Lindgren award, and won the Foyles Children's & Young Adult Book of the Year at the end of 2019.

23 January 2020

Picturehouse Entertainment will release visionary director, Justin Kerzel’s (Macbeth, Snowtown) adaptation of the Booker Prize winning novel by Peter Carey on 28 February to UK and Irish cinemas.

The film stars George MacKay (1917, Pride), Nicholas Hoult (Tolkien, The Favourite), Essie Davis (The Babadook, Babyteeth), Charlie Hunnam (King Arthur, Crimson Peak) Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit, Last Night In Soho) and Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind, Master & Commander: The Far Side Of The World).

True History of the Kelly Gang had its Premiere at this year’s Toronto Film Festival to critical acclaim, and it has already won the Australian Writers’ Guild award for Best Adaptation.

Buzz around its release is now building, with the Guardian saying the film is ‘a punk power-chord of defiance and anarchy’, and the Hollywood Reporter calling it ‘Kurzel’s best film to date’.

Kurzel’s film shatters the mythology of the notorious icon to reveal the essence behind the life of Ned Kelly and in doing so will take audiences on a mesmerizing journey into the ashe...

14 December 2019

Dutch documentary Bellingcat – Truth in a Post Truth World, which navigates the idea of "citizen investigative journalism," took the International Emmy for Documentary this week. The VPRO production looked at the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH 17 and the poisoning of a Russian spy in the UK. This documentary attempts to search for the truth in an era of fake news, which is currently a significant issue that faces global society.

Bellingcat, founded by Eliot Higgins in 2014, is the home of online investigative journalism that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. Visit their website to learn more: www.bellingcat.com

14 December 2019

László Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, has won the award for Translated Literature at the 2019 National Book Awards. It has only been a year since this prize category was first established by the National Book Foundation in order to broaden readership for global voices and spark dialogue around international stories. This prize honours both the author and the translator for work published in the US. Krasznahorkai’s novel, published in Hungarian in 2016 by Magveto as Báró Wenckheim hazatér, was translated as Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming this year by Ottilie Mulzet, and published by New Directions Publishing.

14 December 2019

Constellations: Reflections from Life, Sinéad Gleeson's essay collection about living in a female body, was voted Irish Non-fiction Book of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards this week. Gleeson previously won the best Irish published book award in 2015 and 2016 for her anthologies of Irish women writers, The Long Gaze Back and the Glass Shore. Next autumn, Head of Zeus will publish her latest anthology, The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories.

Colm Tóibín also received a standing ovation as he was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of the central position he has occupied in the cultural life of Ireland for over three decades, with acclaimed works including Brooklyn, The Master and The Testament of Mary.

Massive congratulations to both winners and to Catherine Doyle, Moïra Fowley-Doyle and Fintan O'Toole on their nominations.

14 December 2019

Fiona Benson's Vertigo & Ghost is the winner of this year's prestigious £10,000 Forward prize for best poetry collection. This pulls the violence of Greek myths into the #MeToo era and explores female fear, desire and ferocity, while rebranding the god Zeus as a serial rapist. Shahidha Bari, the chair of the judges, called it “a work of unfaltering determination and self-inspection. It is an exhilarating collection that pulses with fury, fear and defiance – and enduring hope too.”

In addition to the Forward Poetry Prize, we are also delighted to hear that Benson's Vertigo & Ghost has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize for poetry.

14 December 2019

Awarding the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature to Olga Tokarczuk in December 2019 the Nobel committee praised the Polish novelist "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." Tokarczuk follows fellow RCW author Kazuo Ishiguro who was awarded the prize the previous year for  "novels of great emotional force, [which] uncover the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." RCW congratulates them both most warmly.

Tokarczuk said in her statement that:

"I first learned that I had won the Nobel prize in the oddest circumstances - on the motorway, somewhere "In Between", at a place with no name. I can't think of a better metaphor to define the world we're living in today. Nowadays we writers are having to confront ever more improbable challenges, and yet literature is a slow-moving art - the lengthy process of writing makes it difficult to catch the world in the act. I often wonder if it's still possible to describe the world at all, or if we're already too helpless in the face of its increasingly fluid shape, the dissolving of ...

14 December 2019

We are delighted to announce that The Long Take by Robin Robertson has won the tenth Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, becoming both the first Scot and the first poet to win the prize.

Accepting his Prize from writer Alexander McCall Smith and the Prize’s sponsor the Duke of Buccleuch at the Baillie Gifford Borders Book Festival on Saturday 15^thJune, Robin Robertson said that, like Walter Scott, he had started as a poet and then moved into narrative fiction ‘by accident’, as The Long Take started as a poem but became something longer.

The Judges said:

“It’s ten years since the spectacular inauguration of the Walter Scott Prize, with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall our first winner. The Prize was founded both to acknowledge the part historical fiction plays in our literary landscape, and to broaden and deepen the meaning of the term ‘historical fiction’ itself. Since then, many of the finest writers in English have explored historical themes in increasingly original ways, making the task of choosing a winner ever more difficult.

“It seems right that in our tenth anniversary year we should celebrate this orig...

14 December 2019

Guardian journalist’s The Wife’s Tale takes the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature award for a work best evoking ‘spirit of a place’.

Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale, a biography of her grandmother who was born in northern Ethiopia more than 100 years ago and married at the age of eight, has won the £10,000 RSL Ondaatje prize.

Given to a work of literature that best evokes the “spirit of a place”, the Royal Society of Literature award counts Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes and Alan Johnson’s This Boy among its former winners. Edemariam, a Guardian journalist, beat titles including Sarah Moss’s conjuring of iron age Northumberland, Ghost Wall, and Adam Weymouth’s travelogue, ...

14 December 2019

We are delighted to announce that Richard Powers has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Overstory (William Heinemann).

As the monumental importance of trees lies at the heart of The Overstory, Powers is hopeful that his win signals a growing respect both for environmental fiction and the natural world itself, and demonstrates that "there are readers out there who are hungry for a story that re-connects us to this world that we’re so alienated from."

The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University each spring since 1917 in a range of categories including Public Service, Investigative Reporting, Fiction, and Poetry.

(Agent for Richard Powers: Peter Straus)