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Adventure time: Shivaun Plozza on ‘The Boy, the Wolf and the Stars’

Wednesday, 26 August 2020
Shivaun Plozza's middle-grade debut The Boy, the Wolf and the Stars (Puffin, 20 October) is a fantasy adventure about a boy who is tasked with returning the stars to the sky....

OzCo report: more Australians reading for pleasure

Wednesday, 26 August 2020
The number of Australians reading for pleasure has increased over the three years to 2019, according to the Australia Council’s fourth National Arts Participation Survey, while a Covid-19-specific survey commissioned...

Hardie Grant, RMIT announce new narrative nonfiction prize

Wednesday, 26 August 2020
Hardie Grant Books and RMIT Writing and Publishing have established a new biennial developmental prize for narrative nonfiction. Open to published and unpublished Australian writers, the Spark Prize offers $2000...

RWA awards 2020 winners announced

Wednesday, 26 August 2020
The winners of the 2020 Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) Romantic Book of the Year awards, known as the Ruby Awards, have been announced. The winners include: Contemporary romance The...

Affirm acquires Williams’ ‘The Bookbinder of Jericho’

Tuesday, 25 August 2020
Affirm Press has acquired Pip Williams' second novel The Bookbinder of Jericho, set in the same world as her bestselling debut The Dictionary of Lost Words. The Bookbinder of Jericho...

Readings announces 2020 New Australian Fiction Prize shortlist

Tuesday, 25 August 2020
Readings has announced the shortlist for its 2020 New Australian Fiction Prize. The shortlisted books are: The Animals In That Country (Laura Jean McKay, Scribe) Dolores (Lauren Aimee Curtis, W&N)...

Nathan Hollier on the Indian book market

Monday, 24 August 2020
Over the past two years, Melbourne University Publishing CEO Nathan Hollier attended book fairs in Indonesia, India and Malaysia and researched the book markets in each country as part of...

CWF 2020: All live events sold out; ‘strong uptake’ for streaming

Monday, 24 August 2020
This year’s Canberra Writers Festival (CWF) included a mix of live and online-only events with over 60 artists. All events were streamed, with 34 writers and moderators appearing in-person and...

Ellmann, Szirtes win James Tait Black prizes

Monday, 24 August 2020
In the UK, Lucy Ellmann and George Szirtes have won the James Tait Black prizes for fiction and biography respectively. Ellmann won the fiction prize for her novel Ducks, Newburyport...

Epstein’s ‘Small Spaces’ optioned for film

Monday, 24 August 2020
Small Spaces (Sarah Epstein, Walker Books) has been optioned for film by Triptych Pictures and US producer Rebecca Green via Alex Adsett. Triptych produced feature film The Babadook and TV...

Lui to curate new A&U imprint

Monday, 24 August 2020
Writer, actor and director Nakkiah Lui will curate a new imprint, Joan, at Allen & Unwin (A&U). Named for Lui’s grandmother, the imprint will commission books across all genres, with...

ABDA 2020 winners announced

Friday, 21 August 2020
The Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA) has announced the winners of the 2020 Australian Book Design Awards. Chosen from shortlists announced in April, the winners in each category are: Best...

Light wins 2020 PEN/Ackerley Prize

Friday, 21 August 2020
In the UK, Alison Light has won the 2020 PEN/Ackerley Prize for a work of memoir or autobiography, for her memoir A Radical Romance (Fig Tree), reports the Bookseller. Light...

Magabala announces fellowship for mid-career writers

Friday, 21 August 2020
Magabala Books has launched a new fellowship for mid-career First Nations writers and storytellers, worth $10,000. The Magabala Fellowship, supported by the Serp Hills Foundation, is open to Aboriginal and...

US publishing sales down 4.2% in first half of 2020

Thursday, 20 August 2020
According to the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) latest StatShot report, the US publishing industry’s revenues were down 4.2% in the first half of 2020, although trade sales were up...

ILF to hold Indigenous Literacy Day YouTube event

Thursday, 20 August 2020
This year, in lieu of its usual celebration at the Sydney Opera House, the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) will post a 45-minute 'visual event' on its YouTube channel to celebrate...

Fry, Tu appointed Age/SMH emerging book critics

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Book critics Declan Fry and Jessie Tu have been appointed to write for Nine’s newspapers, replacing Jack Callil and Bec Kavanagh, who resigned from the Copyright Agency/Judith Neilson Institute-funded emerging...

Synchronicity Australia options FitzGerald’s ‘Ash Mountain’ for screen

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Synchronicity Australia, the new Melbourne-based arm of Glasgow production company Synchronicity Films, has acquired screen rights to Helen FitzGerald's forthcoming novel Ash Mountain (Affirm, March 2021). Affirm Press described Ash Mountain...

Hope in chaos: Asphyxia on ‘Future Girl’

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Writer and artist Asphyxia's illustrated YA novel Future Girl (A&U, October) is set in an 'eerily plausible' dystopian Melbourne, and follows a Deaf teen Piper as she learns to embrace her...

Nathan Hollier on the Indonesian book market

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Over the past two years, Melbourne University Publishing CEO Nathan Hollier attended book fairs in Indonesia, India and Malaysia and researched the book markets in each country as part of...

Hachette announces paid summer internship program

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Hachette Australia has announced it will run a new annual paid internship program ‘for anyone interested in a career in publishing’. The Hachette Australia Summer Internship Program will run for...

Report finds people reading more books due to Covid-19

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
A new research report from GlobalWebIndex (GWI) has found 20% of Australians and 26% of New Zealanders surveyed are reading more books due to Covid-19. The coronavirus-focused market research report...

Transit Lounge acquires Papathanasiou’s ‘The Stoning’

Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Transit Lounge has acquired world English rights to debut crime fiction novel The Stoning by Peter Papathanasiou, via Martin Shaw from Shaw Literary. Canberra-based Papathanasiou, who published his memoir Little...

Kamaleddine’s ‘The Truth About Luck’ wins inaugural Matilda Children’s Literature Prize

Tuesday, 18 August 2020
Samera Kamaleddine has won HarperCollins Australia’s inaugural Matilda Children’s Literature Prize for her YA manuscript The Truth About Luck. Kamaleddine’s novel tells the story of a 16-year-old Lebanese–Australian Layla Karimi,...