Festival News

Britain’s most diverse festival, Bradford Literary Festival, is taking place, 3-12 July. Among the headline names are Prue Leith, discussing her memoir, David Larbi, hosting a masterclass, authors Jessie Elland, Lucy Rose and Charlotte Paradise, exploring gothic fiction, and heartstopper actor Bradley Riches, in conversation. Other notable speakers include Lemn Sissay, Vince Cable, Abir Mukherjee, Jeremy Corbyn, Hannah Spencer, Fatima Bhutto and A.A. Dhand alongside a wide range of writers, commentators and cultural figures.

Authors Reading Month, the largest festival in central Europe, runs throughout July in Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. This 27th edition spotlighting Greenland, brings 31 Greenlandic authors alongside local European writers across six cities: Brno, Ostrava, Bratislava, Prešov, Trenčín, and Lviv.

The Mysuru Literature Festival (Karnataka, southern India), spans two days (4-5 July) featuring two distinct stages. One highlights the rich literary heritage of the region by showcasing local language authors and artists, while the other provides a platform for English-language authors and artists.

The 26th International Literature Festival Berlin (3-12 September) will celebrate its 26^th year with readings and conversations with Nobel Literature laureate Han Kang, Christian Kracht, Cornelia Funke, Christopher Clark and Dave Eggers. Other highlights in the programme, which has just been released, are Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Julia Fiedorczuk, Daniela Catrileo, Katie Kitamura, Douglas Stuart, Adania Shibli, Vigdis Hjorth and Amitav Ghosh. Indian writer, poet and musician Jeet Thayil is the guest curator. At the heart of his ten events are collaboration, improvisation, and the singularity of artistic performance. His guests include Eileen Myles, Tishani Doshi and Mohammed Hanif.

Byron Writers Festival has announced its programme with 150 international and Australian writes appearing this 14 16 August. Award-winning authors include Booker Prize-winner Richard Flanagan, Indian author and Geetanjali Shree, who won the 2022 International Booker Prize, appearing with her American translator Daisy Rockwell. Non-fiction includes Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by  Micaela Sahhar, who won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and the award for New Writing in the NSW Literary Awards, while  Marika Sosnowski was shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize and the 2026 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the NSW Literary Awards for 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution weaving together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters.

The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival has announced its initial lineup of international and Indonesian storytellers joining the Festival in Bali from 21–25 October, guided by this year’s theme: Samarasā: Awareness. Empathy. Action. Names include Kiran Desai (Booker Prize winner), Katie Kitamura (Booker Prize finalist), Tash Aw (Booker Prize longlisted), Randa Abdel-Fattah (Victorian Premier’s Literary Award winner), plus Nepalese-American fashion designer and memorist Prabal Gurung, critical voices Fatima Bhutto and Adania Shibli, and best-selling authors Simon Winchester and David Lindenmayer. Also announced are two Writers’ Retreats taking place ahead of the Festival with best-selling author Peter Godwin and English-Hong Kong writer Xu Xi.

Industry News

Latoya West-Blackwood, the director of the Jamaica Book Festival in Kingston, is launching a publishing organisation called the Caribbean Collective, Publishers Weekly reports.

The Booker Prize Foundation has announced that the grant-giving organisation Bukhman Philanthropies has committed to funding the International Booker Prize for the next 10 years. As of 2027, the prize will be known as the Bukhman International Booker Prize, and will double from £50,000 to £100,000, to be split equally between the author and translator(s). Booker Prize-shortlisted author Katie Kitamura will chair next year’s judging committee.

Primary Wave Music, a music publisher that acquires and markets artists’ catalogs, is partnering with writer and entrepreneur Richard Hurowitz on a new initiative to buy the rights to major authors’ backlist titles, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir has been named the winner of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Bookseller writes. This past spring, Nazir was accused of using AI to write his prizewinning story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” allegations which prompted a review of the competition and led Granta to end its publishing partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation. Judges said that Nazir’s piece was “an original, poetic, and deeply moving story.” The award includes a £5,000 prize.

The Australian Publishers Association (APA) and other creative industries organisations headed to the federal parliament on 1 July to protest changes to copyright law proposed by the Australian government in connection with AI. That push is also being supported by an Open Letter from the Australian creative industries focused on the message “Without creative content, there are no large language models. There are no AI products. No use without permission and payment for our creative content”. The open letter is open for signature by Australia’s songwriters, recording artists, authors, journalists, photographers, producers, visual artists, composers, screenwriters, playwrights and creative industry businesses.

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction has announced its 2026 shortlist. The $25,000 prize is given each year to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. The goal is to honor writers who, like Le Guin herself, are “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.” The shortlisted titles, which were chosen following a public nomination process, are: Audition (Coffee House Press) by Pip Adam; Sunward (Saga Press) by William Alexander; Call and Response (Neon Hemlock) by Chrisopher Caldwell; Midnight Timetable(Algonquin) by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur; The Works of Vermin (Tor Books) by Hiron Ennes; Notes from a Regicide (Tor Books) by Isaac Fellman; Mad Sisters of Esi (DAW Books) by Tashan Mehta; One Message Remains (Psychopomp) by Premee Mohamed; and Slow Gods (Orbit) by Claire North. The winner will be selected by authors Nicola Griffith, Mat Johnson, Fonda Lee, Darcie Little Badger, and Peter Rock, and announced on October 21, Le Guin’s birthday.

Within and beyond the Big Five, conservative-leaning writers and publishers are working to establish a presence and produce “serious” conservative nonfiction, according to Publishers Weekly. At present, each of the Big Five except Macmillan has at least one imprint for right-of-centre nonfiction.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan has sold more than 300,000 copies in its opening week, according to publisher Simon & Schuster.

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