Book prize judge resigns, claiming none of the other judges “had read all of the books in their entirety”
Lesley McDowell, one of the five judges sitting on this year’s panel for the Saltire Scottish fiction book of the year award, announced her resignation from the panel on Monday.… Read more »
Is the age of prizes over?
OK this might be a difficult one to tackle in a few hundred words, but here’s the gist: do we need prizes any more? Do we want them? Because, the… Read more »
Karl Ove Knausgaard to contribute to the future library
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norwegian author of the six-volume My Struggle saga, has become the sixth author to sign onto the Future Library project. The project, brain-child of Scottish artist Katie… Read more »
Two Nobel prizes in literature to be awarded next week
The Swedish Academy is set to announce two more Nobel laureates next week, after it did not hand out the prize last year. The postponement last year was the result… Read more »
The Booker Prize carries on without The Man
The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Man Booker Prize, is a prize for fiction in the UK. The Man Group pulled funding for the prize earlier this year, but… Read more »
Han Kang “gives” new work to Norwegian forest
This week, a new work by South Korean novelist Han Kang was “given” to a forest in Norway, where it will remain locked in a spruce-lined room until 2114. The author,… Read more »
The launch event for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale sequel will livestream around the world
No matter how you feel about The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s upcoming sequel to her beloved feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, one thing is for sure: It’s going to be… Read more »
Margaret Atwood on getting started in fiction writing
Writing can be a wonderful journey, or a terrible slog. For many writers, certain plot points, sentence structure, character development, dialogue, intention, or even making time to write can put an obstacle the… Read more »
Don’t judge the Hay Festival by its tedious controversy-mongers
Another year at the Hay Festival, the UK’s annual “Woodstock of the mind,” another controversial lecture by a leading academic. Indeed, Germaine Greer has been at it again, this time attempting to redefine… Read more »
Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel — good news for Ishiguro fans, bad news for Atwood fans, complicated news for Ursula Le Guin
The world has a new Nobel laureate in literature. Some people are excited, some people are pissed, and some people just went to see The Book of Mormon. On Thursday,… Read more »