31 March 2020

Ed Clarke's The Secret Dragon, published by Puffin, is shortlisted for the Tir na n-Og Children’s Book Awards 2020. The book, which is appropriately set in Wales, appears in the category of English language books for children of any age with an authentic Welsh background. It follows a scientifically minded character named Mari who is fossil-hunting on the beach when she discovers a tiny, curled-up creature; soon she’s facing the challenges of rearing a mischievous baby dragon while trying to study it and keep it out of trouble.

The winner will be selected in May and the awards are organised by the Books Council of Wales and sponsored by CLIP Cymru Wales, celebrating the work of authors and illustrators published in 2019. 

27 March 2020

Claire Adam is shortlisted for the 2020 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award with her debut Golden Child (Faber & Faber), which is a deeply affecting novel set in Trinidad, following a family as they navigate impossible choices about scarcity, loyalty, and love. The judges called the novel, which has already been named as one of the BBC's most influential novels, "tense, moving and richly atmospheric."

The book is also currently longlisted for the 2020 Jhalak Prize, and the shortlist for this award will be announced on April 14th. The winner of the Best First Novel Award will be revealed on 22nd May and the winning author will receive a £2,500 prize.  

26 March 2020

Holly Jackson and Lauren James have made their debut on the YA Book Prize shortlist this year with A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (Electric Monkey) and The Quiet at the End of the World (Walker Books). Jackson's book is a story of a teenage sleuth who investigates a five-year-old murder case in her small town as part of a school project, while James' is about the last two young people left in the world after a devastating virus caused global infertility. 

The judging panel will be joined again by teenage judges from schools across the country and Julia Eccleshare, children’s director of The Hay Festival, which is partnering with The Bookseller on the prize.

24 March 2020

Valeria Luiselli is this year's winner of the £30,000 Rathbones Folio prize for her third novel, Lost Children Archive, published in the UK by 4th Estate. She accepted the prize from her home in New York in the first ever digital-only Rathbones Folio Prize ceremony, which was initially supposed to take place at the British Library in London. The writer said in her speech, "Giving a literary prize- right now- means that we believe in what we're doing. It means that we believe in books as the vehicles of something much greater than us, something that will outlive us."

This is the first time the annual prize – which rewards the best work of literature of the year, regardless of form – has been awarded to a woman since its inception in 2013. Congratulations to Valeria Luiselli on receiving the award and to Zadie Smith, Sinéad Gleeson, Azadeh Moaveni and Fiona Benson on their nominations.  

20 March 2020

The 2020 British Book Awards have drawn up this year's shortlists for the Best Books of the Year prizes, and among them are Alex Michaelides, Holly Jackson, Katherine Rundell and Alice Oseman. The eight Book of the Year winners will be decided by separate panels: Michaelides' The Silent Patient is up for the Crime & Thriller Book of the Year; Oseman's graphic novel Heartstopper Vol 1. is nominated for the Children’s Illustrated & Non-fiction Book of the Year; and Jackson's A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Rundell's The Good Thieves are both in the run for the Children's Fiction Book of the Year.  

The Nibbies, the annual showcase of the best of the British book industry, will see established authors compete with breakthrough talent for the hotly-contested awards at this year’s ceremony on 29th June.

20 March 2020

Sam Copeland is shortlisted for Literary Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards 2020. He joined Rogers, Coleridge and White in 2006 and was made a director in 2016. He has an extremely diverse list of award-winning and bestselling authors, including Alex Michaelides and Holly Jackson who are respectively up for the Crime & Thriller Book of the Year and Children's Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. 

Sam is also a Children's author and currently welcomes submissions.

19 March 2020

Zadie Smith's turn-of-the-century debut novel White Teeth has made it to the British Book Awards "30 from 30" shortlist, putting it up for a trophy that will crown one book the most influential of the past three decades. A one-off prize, the award celebrates 30 years of publishing excellence since the British Book Awards, or Nibbies, were launched in 1990. 

The shortlist, handpicked by reader and trade votes, is made up of past winners and one wildcard. The winner will be announced later this year. 

19 March 2020

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the names of nineteen writers who will receive its 2020 awards in literature, and among them are Valeria Luiselli and Isabella Hammad. The awards will be presented in New York at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May, honoring both emerging and established writers. 

Valeria Luiselli is the recipient of this year's Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for her novel Lost Children Archive, while Isabella Hammad's The Parisian has picked up the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. 

12 March 2020

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has longlisted both Isabella Hammad's The Parisian, a sweeping love story that spans Palestine, France and Egypt in the first half of the 20th century, and James Meek's To Calais, in Ordinary Time, a novel set in the fourteenth century about home, belonging, love and courage, for this year's £25,000 prize. 

A shortlist will be announced at the beginning of April and each shortlisted author will receive £1,500, an increase from £1,000 in previous years, making it one of the richest literary prizes in the UK. The winner will be announced at the Baillie Gifford Borders Book Festival in Scotland on 12th June.

06 March 2020

Directed by Coky Giedroyc, from a script written by Caitlin Moran herself, the film adaptation of How To Build A Girl is set to be released in UK cinemas later this year on 3 July 2020. It first premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2019 to critical acclaim, and starring are Beanie Feldstein (Booksmart), Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones), Chris O'Dowd (State of the Union), Emma Thompson (Late Night) and Paddy Considine (Peaky Blinders).  

Based on the novel by Caitlin Moran, itself loosely inspired by her own experiences as a young music writer, the film follows Feldstein as Johanna Morrigan – a working class 16-year-old living in Wolverhampton who moves to London and reinvents herself as rock critic Dolly Wilde.

Click here to watch a Q&A with the film's cast and crew at the TIFF.

04 March 2020

The UK’s most prestigious annual book award celebrating and honouring fiction by women, now in its 25th anniversary year, has announced its longlist for the £30,000 award, which celebrates “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from across the world”. It features Deepa Anappara's debut Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, in which a nine-year-old investigates why children have been disappearing in an unnamed Indian city; Anne Enright’s Actress, in which a daughter explores her famous mother’s breakdown; and Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, which tells the story of the Trojan war from the perspective of the women involved.

The shortlist will be announced on 22 April, and the winner, who will receive an anonymously endowed cheque for £30,000, on 3 June.

27 February 2020

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's Animalia, translated from French by Frank Wynne, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. The prize supports small, independent presses who publish the most interesting and innovative literature being written today. 

While Del Amo has published four novels in his native France, Animalia (orginally titled Règne Animal) is the first to appear in English, in a translation by Frank Wynne. The book retraces the history of a modest peasant family through the twentieth century as they develop their small plot of land into an intensive pig farm. It is about war, violence, sickness and cruelty, and about the relationship between men, women, animals and the natural world.

26 February 2020

Zadie Smith's Grand Union, Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, Sinéad Gleeson's Constellations, Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows and Fiona Benson's Vertigo & Ghost are among the eight books shortlisted for the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize. This fantastic list makes up five out of the six female authors on the shortlist for the £30,000 prize that has never been won by a woman. 

Set up in the wake of controversy around the 2011 Booker prize, which saw chair of judges Stella Rimington praising “readability” and books that “zip along”, to the dismay of parts of the literary establishment, the £30,000 prize rewards “the best work of literature of the year, regardless of form”. The winner will be announced on 23 March in a ceremony at the British Library.

12 February 2020

Holly Jackson's #1 New York Times bestseller A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, a novel inspired by true crime, is on the shortlist for the 2020 Waterstones Children's Book Prize in the Books for Older Readers category. The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize shortlists consist of 18 entries across three categories – illustrated books, books for younger readers and books for older readers. Each category comprises six entries which will compete for category winner. Jackson's agent, Sam Copeland, is shortlisted in the Books for Younger Readers Category with his debut Charlie Changes Into a Chicken. 

All the nominees are chosen by booksellers to showcase the finest new talent in children's publishing. The winners will be announced at an evening reception at Waterstones Piccadilly on Thursday 26th March, 2020.

11 February 2020

Claire Adam has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize for her debut novel Golden Child, published in the US by Hogarth Press. Barnes & Noble, the major US-based book retailer, has awarded the prize annually since 1990 in honour of outstanding works from new authors. The authors of the winning books will receive a cash prize and marketing support from the bookseller. Golden Child is among the eight books chosen from a selection of more than 1,000 titles. 

Golden Child is a deeply affecting debut novel set in Trinidad, following a family as they navigate impossible choices about scarcity, loyalty, and love. The Discover Award adds to Adam's list of accolades, which also includes the UK Desmond Elliot Prize.

31 January 2020

The award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams has recently adapted the classics Three Sisters and The Little Prince for the stage at the National Threatre and the Stratford Circus Arts Centre. 

Three Sisters, which is running at the National Theatre from December 2019 until mid-February 2020, relocates Chekhov’s iconic characters to 1960s Nigeria. Set on the brink of the Biafran Civil War, we have Lolo, Nne and Udo pining for Lagos from the vantage of a village near Owerri, a city in the heart of Igboland to which their late father brought them to connect with their ancestral roots. It’s directed by Nadia Fall, artistic director of Theatre Royal Stratford East, and features Sarah Niles, Natalie Simpson and Racheal Ofori as the eponymous siblings, plus Ken Nwosu, Tobi Bamtefa, Jude Akuwudike, Ronke Adekoluejo, Anni Domingo, and others. 

Ellams' next play, which is also his first work for children, will create an Afro-futurist reimagining of classic French story The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and is directed by Femi Eluffowoju Jr with design by Miriam Nabarro and mu...

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.