Imagine you could erase your grief. Imagine you could forget your pain. Imagine you could hide a secret forever. Emmett Farmer is working in the... Read more

This year’s Brisbane Writers festival (BWF), which ran from 6 to 9 September, was programmed by guest artistic director Carl Lindgren, who worked with the... Read more

The shortlist for the 2018 Waverley Library Award for Literature, known as ‘the Nib’, have been announced. The shortlisted titles are: Relatively Famous (Roger Averill,... Read more

The longlist for the 2018 Voss Literary Prize has been announced. The longlisted titles are: No More Boats (Felicity Castagna, Giramondo) The Life to Come... Read more

Three Australian book industry companies have made the Top 500 Private Companies List, reports the Australian Financial Review (AFR). Book retailer The Co-Op and Australian Geographic ranked... Read more

Specialist poetry publisher Five Islands Press has announced the company will wind up in 2020. The small press announced last week that it is no... Read more

Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) has acquired ANZ rights to En Garde by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young. ‘Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s private life became a matter of... Read more

UK imprint Lightning Books has acquired New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey’s 2017 novel The Beat of the Pendulum (Victoria University Press), reports the Bookseller. Caroline Dawnay... Read more

Hardie Grant Egmont has sold German-language rights to Rhiannon Williams’ Ottilie Colter and the Narroway Hunt, plus two further books by Williams, to Random House Germany... Read more

Scribe associate publisher Marika Webb-Pullman has been awarded a fellowship by Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF). Webb-Pullman is one of 16 book industry professionals to receive... Read more

The New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) has announced that Dunedin writer Sue Wootton is the winner of the 2018 Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship.... Read more

Australian bookselling chain Dymocks has launched a new education business called Potentia. Potentia will run tutoring programs for school students across a broad range of... Read more

Bookselling chain Harry Hartog plans to open stores at Glenside in South Australia, Maroochydore in Queensland and Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, bringing its... Read more

Melbourne children’s bookshop The Little Bookroom will hold its first kids book festival in October, called Kids Book Fest. Held at the Fitzroy Town Hall,... Read more

In France, the European Parliament has voted in favour of copyright reforms that aim to update digital copyright laws for the internet age. The legislation... Read more

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has asked to be withdrawn from Sweden’s New Academy prize in literature, reports Reuters. In a post on its Facebook page, the... Read more

In the US, the National Book Award fiction longlist has been announced. The finalists in the fiction category are: A Lucky Man (Jamel Brinkley, Graywolf Press)... Read more

In the US, longlists in four categories of the National Book Award have been announced, including the inaugural award for translated literature. The longlists announced... Read more

In the UK, the shortlist for the £30,000 (A$55,180) Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award has been announced. This year’s six shortlisted titles... Read more

In the US, department store retailer Target has been accused of redacting some words from the descriptions of books on its website, reports Publishers Weekly. According... Read more

The finalists of the Digital Book World (DBW) Awards have been announced. The awards are presented as part of the DBW conference, and recognise ‘worldwide... Read more

Sales Fiction Caroline Dawnay at United Agents sold UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada and ANZ) rights to The Beat of the Pendulum (Catherine Chidgey) to... Read more

The top 10 bestsellers chart this week is looking very similar to last week’s chart, with The Barefoot Investor (Scott Pape, Wiley) and Pig the Grub (Aaron Blabey, Scholastic)... Read more

Chris Hammer’s crime-fiction debut Scrublands—which has been sold into numerous overseas territories and optioned for television—has debuted in first place in the Australian fiction bestsellers... Read more

‘Foxlee’s writing is brimming with perfectly constructed moments that merge into a truly sensational, heart-wrenching read. This is the kind of book that makes a... Read more

‘Books are the last frontier of freedom and wilderness for kids, for imagining dangerous things, for imagining craziness and worst-case scenarios’—Children’s author Andy Griffiths on putting the anarchy back into childhood.

The Little Bookroom founder Albert Ullin has died, aged 88. Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1930, Ullin moved to Australia in 1939 before the outbreak... Read more

Sales representative and agent Tony Catt has died, aged 90. Tony and his wife, Pauline, came to Australia from England as ‘ten-pound poms’ and settled... Read more

The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) has announced a new campaign that will promote the library profession throughout 2019. The Truth, Integrity, Knowledge (TIK) campaign... Read more

Public Libraries Victoria Network (PLVN) and State Library Victoria (SLV) have begun a statewide campaign to raise awareness and grow funding for Victorian public libraries.... Read more

US author James Patterson is donating £50,000 (A$91,400) to school libraries in the UK, in partnership with Scholastic UK Book Clubs, reports the Bookseller. £25,000... Read more

Jackie Tang talks to Lonely Planet’s Chris Zeiher, APA Publications’ Agnieszka Mizak and former Dymocks category manager Ali Hammond about the state of the travel... Read more

Launched in 2018, The Monthly Hour is a podcast companion to The Monthly magazine, described as ‘an essential hour of news, culture and ideas that... Read more

Spinifex Press is encouraging readers to buy a book that has been published by an independent publisher and sold by an independent bookseller to celebrate International Bibliodiversity Day on 21 September.

In 2010, Latin American publisher members of the International Alliance of Independent Publishers created Bibliodiversity Day to celebrate independent publishing and bibliodiversity. The term ‘bibliodiversity’ refers to the ‘cultural diversity’ of books, scripts, apps and oral literature. 

In celebrating the day, Spinifex publisher Susan Hawthorne said, ‘Let us share books, ideas and resources more equally and listen to the unheard voices.’ Hawthorne hopes to ensure that the ‘voices of marginalised peoples are heard consistently, not just as a passing fashion’ and has a ‘mission to publish risky, controversial, innovative and imaginative voices.’ Publishers, booksellers, book professionals and readers are invited celebrate the day.

Hawthorne wrote about the concept of bibliodiversity in her 2014 book Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing (Spinifex). She writes, ‘It is useful to think of bibliodiversity as a view from below. Like old trees in the right soil, the roots are culturally deep.’  

To promote the day, Spinifex is sharing a youtube video here.