Only 1% of children’s books in the UK depict Black And Minority Ethnic main characters
Children’s books are making headlines again — this time for their lack of diversity. In the UK, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) has been running a study entitled “Reflecting Realities”… Read more »
Say it isn’t so: video games are influencing kids to read books
That’s a headline I never expected to write with any sincerity — but according to Alison Flood and Sian Cain at the Guardian, the popular video game Minecraft has become a sort of… Read more »
What about children’s books makes us “easy to manipulate”?
Last week the British children’s writer Geraldine McCaughrean took home the Carnegie Medal for her book Where the World Ends. Upon receiving her country’s most prestigious children’s award (which is selected by… Read more »
Marian Keyes has (justifiably) taken agin the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
More controversy has emerged from this year’s Hay Festival (which we reported on last week): during her talk, best-selling novelist Marian Keyes called out the organisers of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.… Read more »
The Wodehouse Prize committee confirms that last year was a humorless clusterfuck
At last, there’s proof of just how unfunny the past year has been. We knew it. I mean, we lived it. Three hundred and sixty-five days tripped over themselves in unmitigated calamity. That the… Read more »
Are children’s books becoming dangerously introspective and depressing?
The 2018 Brandford Boase Award, an annual British prize celebrating outstanding debut novels for young people, has just announced its shortlist. This year the judges noticed a depressing trend: at least a third… Read more »
Waterstones, the UK’s largest (and only) bookshop chain has been sold
It’s been the talk of the UK publishing industry for months… what fate awaits the only bookshop chain left in our country? It was announced Waterstones was up for sale in… Read more »
Sur-prize: Another day, another shortlist causing controversy
This year’s Rathbones Folio Prize shortlist was announced on Tuesday, and guess what? Six out of the eight books on it are published by Penguin Random House. Four of them have… Read more »
These marginalia in a sixteenth-century Hamlet may be Shakespeare’s own
“I saw these faint marks, and my eyes popped out of my head,” Shakespeare scholar John Casson told Alison Flood at the Guardian. Casson was perusing the British Library’s copy of… Read more »
George R.R. Martin is funding a scholarship to bring a little wonder into this world
Let me begin by dashing your hopes: the story you’re about to read discusses George R.R. Martin, but contains no updates on Winds of Winter. Sorry. I’m as impatient as you are. Instead,… Read more »