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In brief 

Tuesday, 14 August 2012
SLV team named Innovator of the Month The Learning Services team at the State Library of Victoria (SLV) has been named ‘Innovator of the Month’ by the Victorian Government’s Department...

Penguin to launch children’s classics list 

Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Penguin Australia has announced it will publish a new list of children’s classics. The Penguin Australian Children's Classics ‘is a celebration of our country's most precious childhood stories, presented in...

Writing Australia regional residencies announced 

Monday, 13 August 2012
Writing Australia has announced the first recipients of its regional residency program, Writing Australia Places. Melanie Joosten from Victoria will spend four weeks in Orange, NSW, working on a novel...

Rights round-up 

Monday, 13 August 2012
Sales Fiction—UWA Publishing has sold Indian rights to The Walls of Delhi (Uday Prakash, translated by Jason Grunebaum). Nonfiction—Murdoch Books has sold North American, Dutch, French, German, Swedish, Polish and...

Bestsellers this week 

Monday, 13 August 2012
QF32 (Richard De Crespigny, Macmillan), in which Flight Captain Richard De Crespigny narrates the true story of a near-fatal flight from Singapore to Sydney in November 2010, is third on the fastest-movers chart and...

RiP Helen Gurley Brown 

Monday, 13 August 2012
Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and the author of Sex and the Single Girl (1962), among other books, has died aged 90.

2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards shortlists announced

Thursday, 9 August 2012
The shortlists for this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards have been announced. The shortlisted titles—collectively known as 'the Premier's 21'—are: Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction ($25,000) Foal’s Bread (Gillian Mears,...

2012 Deadly Awards finalists announced

Thursday, 9 August 2012
The finalists for this year’s Deadly Awards, presented to Indigenous Australians for excellence in the areas of music, sport, entertainment and community, have been announced. The finalists for the Outstanding Achievement...

2012 Davitt Awards shortlists announced

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
The shortlists for this year’s Davitt Awards, presented by Sisters in Crime for crime books written by Australian women, have been announced. The shortlisted titles in each of the categories...

Quote of the week 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
‘One of the only commonalities among the people I met who work specifically on digital projects is that, five years ago, they couldn’t have imagined what they are doing now....

New Sydney literary magazine launched 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
A biannual magazine of international writing has been launched in Sydney. Contrappasso, which means ‘counter-step’ or ‘counter-blow’ in Italian, contains fiction, nonfiction, interviews and poetry, and is being published as...

Steele and Noble awarded Life Membership of Editors Victoria 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
Liz Steele and Rosemary Noble, who currently serve as co-presidents of Editors Victoria, have been awarded Honorary Life Membership of Editors Victoria for services to the editing profession. Steele recently completed...

HarperCollins combines Zondervan, Thomas Nelson 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
HarperCollins is now the largest Christian publisher in the US, after combining its newly acquired Thomas Nelson business with its Zondervan division in a new Christian publishing division, reports Digital...

Spain increases VAT on ebooks 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced an increase in the Value Added Tax (VAT) rate that affects ebooks last month as part of the country’s austerity measures, reports Publishing Perspectives....

ABA, B&N brief accepted in DOJ case 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
In the US, federal judge Denise Cote has granted a motion by the American Booksellers Association (ABA) and Barnes & Noble to file a ‘friend of the court’ brief as...

Bookstores get ready for National Bookshop Day

Wednesday, 8 August 2012
The second annual National Bookshop Day will be held on Saturday 11 August 2012, with many booksellers around Australia staging events on the day. Details of events are being announced on the National...

On the epidemic of niceness in online book culture

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
In an article at Slate, US writer Jacob Silverman argues that today’s online book culture has become a ‘mutual admiration society’ which discourages criticism and dissent. The writer Emma Straub...

Random House sponsors National Seniors Literary Prize 

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Random House Australia is sponsoring the 2012 National Seniors Literary Prize, presented by National Seniors Australia. The prize is in its second year, and is open to works of fiction written...

Four new Katherine Mansfield stories discovered 

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Four previously unknown stories by Katherine Mansfield have been discovered in the archives of King’s College, London, by PhD student Chris Mourant. Gerri Kimber, senior lecturer at the University of...

New Holland to publish ‘MasterChef’ book 

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Random House, which has published the winners’ cookbooks from the first three series of the cooking reality television program MasterChef, will not be publishing the book by this year’s winner....

New Avenue Bookstore to open in Elsternwick

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Independent Melbourne bookseller Avenue Bookstore will open a new store in Elsternwick in October, following the purchase of independent bookstore Sunflower Bookshop. Sunflower Bookshop, located at 434 Glenhuntly Road in...

Webber appointed CEO of Bookworld 

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
James Webber, former ecommerce and digital manager at REDgroup Retail, has been appointed CEO of Bookworld, the division of Pearson Australia which operates the Angus & Robertson (A&R) and the...