20 March 2024

The film adaptation of Poor Things was met with acclaim during the latest awards season, scoring big in multiple categories. Based on Alasdair Gray's acclaimed novel, the film picked up prizes at the Academy Awards, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes, among others, winning across several categories including Best Actress and Best Production Design.

Set against the backdrop of a dark Victorian Glasgow, the Guardian Fiction Prize-winning novel Poor Things echoes the story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and explores social inequalities, identity and our relationship to culture and heritage.

Adapted by screenwriter Tony McNamara, the film is directed by absurdist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, behind The Lobster and Bafta and Oscar winning The Favourite. Starring as the lead is Emma Stone alongside Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley and Jerrod Carmichael.

Poor Things is now available to watch at home on Disney+.

06 March 2024

Emily Perkins's novel Lioness (Bloomsbury) is shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, as finalists in the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are announced. The book explores the reality behind the facade in a seductive story of power, privilege and personal rebellion. Emily Perkins previously won the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry in 2009 for Novel About My Wife.

The 16 finalists were selected from a longlist of 44 books by panels of specialist judges across four categories: fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction, and general non-fiction.

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06 March 2024

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

A shortlist of six titles will be announced on 24 April, and the winner will be announced on 13 June, along with the winner of the inaugural Women’s prize for non-fiction. The winning author will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a bronze statuette known as the “Bessie”, created by the artist Grizel Niven.

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27 February 2024

Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), Tom Crewe’s The New Life (Chatto & Windus) and Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain, Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury) are among the books longlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Honouring the achievements of the founding father of the historical novel, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes. The winner receives £25,000 and shortlisted authors each receive £1,500. Since it was founded fifteen years ago by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, the Prize has awarded nearly £400,000 to writers and brought over 150 great novels to wider public attention.

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27 February 2024

Tom Crewe's The New Life (Vintage) and Wiz Wharton's Ghost Girl, Banana (Hodder & Stoughton) are among those longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, now in its 70th year.

The shortlist will be announced on 25th March with an event for shortlisted writers at the National Liberal Club in London on 24th April. The winner will be announced at a dinner at the National Liberal Club on 22nd May. Inaugurated in 1954, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award is now in its 70th year, making it the longest-running UK prize for debut fiction and – except for the James Tait Black and the Hawthornden – the oldest literary prize in Britain.  

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27 February 2024

Tom Crewe and Noreen Masud have been shortlisted for Young Writer of the Year Award 2024. Tom Crewe is in the running for his debut about "19th-Century forbidden desire", The New Life (Vintage), which won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature, and was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Noreen Masud is competing for the award with her "raw and radical" autobiography, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton), which is also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024.

The Charlotte Aitken Trust has increased the prize sum to £10,000. Each shortlistee also receives £1,000. The winner will be announced in a ceremony at Canova Hall in Brixton, London, on 19th March 2024.

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15 February 2024

Sixteen women – including Cat Bohannon and Noreen Masud – are in the running for the inaugral Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, launched to redress the relatively low numbers of women recognised in nonfiction prizes. Cat Bohannon is longlisted for Eve (Hutchinson Heinemann) and Noreen Masud for her debut A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton).

The launch of the nonfiction prize came in the wake of research commissioned by the Women’s prize that found that only 35% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the past 10 years were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes. The Prize will be awarded annually and is open to all women writers from across the globe who are published in the UK and writing in English. The winner receives a cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the ‘Charlotte’, both gifted by the Charlotte Aitken Trust.

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08 February 2024

Pari Thomson and G.M. Linton have been shortlisted for the £5,000 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, which is voted for by booksellers. In the Younger Readers category, G M Linton's "gently funny" My Name Is Sunshine Simpson (Usborne Publishing) is shortlisted this year, alongside Pari Thomson’s "immersive fantasy" magical-door adventure, Greenwild (Pan Macmillan).

The shortlists comprise 18 books across three categories, with six books vying within each category to be crowned category winner. Three category winners will then compete for the overall title of Waterstones Children’s Book Prize Winner 2024. The winner of each category will receive £2,000, with the overall winner receiving an extra £3,000.

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08 February 2024

Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams are set to star in the feautre adaptation of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, with newcomers Mia Tharia and Aran Murphy joining the cast. In its March 2021 publication by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Faber in the UK, the book debuted on the New York Times’ Best Sellers Hardcover Fiction List at #3 and the Indie Best Sellers Hardcover Fiction List at #1. 

Adapted by screenwriter Dahvi Waller, the film tells the story of Klara (Jenna Ortega), an Artificial Friend designed to prevent loneliness. Klara is purchased by a mother (Amy Adams) and a bright teen named Josie (Mia Tharia) who adores her new robot companion, but suffers from a mysterious illness. This is the story of Klara’s quest to save Josie and those who love her from heartbreak and how in the process Klara learns the power of human love. Aran Murphy makes his feature film debut as Rick, Josie’s best friend and next-door neighbor.

Taika Waititi has been attached to the project since the spring, and Kazuo Ishiguro is serving as an executive producer. Producers of the film adaptation are Heyday Films’ David Heyman, Garrett Basch, and Waititi.

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30 January 2024

The freshly launched Nero Book Awards celebrate books and writers from the UK and Ireland published in the past 12 months across four categories: children’s fiction, debut fiction, fiction and non-fiction. Of these four category winners, one book will be selected as the overall winner and recipient of the Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year, to be announced at a ceremony in London on 14th March.

Paul Murray has won the fiction category for his fourth novel, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton), the latest in a string of prize nods including a Booker shortlisting, an An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023 win and a nomination for The Writer’s Prize 2024. At 650 pages, the novel took five years to complete and tells the story of a middle-class Irish family in turmoil, as the effects of the post-2008 banking crisis take their toll. Judges said: "Hilarious and tragic in equal measure, The Bee Sting is 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?"

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29 January 2024

'The Rise' by Ian Rankin has been nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Amazon Publishing acquired Ian's standalone short thriller for its Amazon Original Stories imprint, which publishes single-sitting reads from bestselling authors, acclaimed storytellers and new voices.

'The Rise' tells the story of the suspicion that ensues when a nightwatchman is found slain in the entrance lobby of a new steel-and-glass residential tower in London. Amazon Original Stories are available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers and Prime members. Amazon said the imprint aims to offer the opportunity for authors to step outside of the formats or genres they’re known for and connect with new readers.

Click here for the full list of nominations. 

18 January 2024

RCW is delighted to announce the acquisition of the Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency. Caroline will continue to be closely involved, still representing a number of CSLA authors, meanwhile the promotion of Millie van Grutten to agent marks the beginning of a new illustrated children’s book division for RCW.

Film and television rights for CSLA clients will be under the continued care of Emily Hayward Whitlock at The Artist's Partnership. 

Caroline Sheldon said: "Forty years after first founding CSLA, my priority remains the continuing success and happiness of CSLA’s talented and inspirational authors and illustrators.  

"Nothing will give me more pleasure than to see their careers grow at RCW, benefitting from our respective strengths for the years to come. Also, I am so much looking forward with excitement to the prospect of working alongside my  new RCW colleagues."

Claire Wilson, head of RCW children’s, said: "To welcome CSLA into the RCW fold is an extraordinary privilege. I have long admired the exceptional list of clients represented by Caroline and Millie, and all of their phenomenal work.  

"Caroline is an industry legend – famous fo...