Festival News

Auckland Writers Festival  gets underway this week (12-17 May) bringing together the very best local and international writers to New Zealand. Yann Martel, Amitav Ghosh, Tayari Jones, Ian McEwen, Mick Herron, R F Kuang and Roddy Doyle head the line-up.

Tayari Jones will also be appearing at the International Literature Festival Dublin (15-24 May) along with Kathryn Stockett, Tana French, Elif Shafak, Patrick Gale, Helen Oyemi, Maria Stepanova, Douglas Stewart, Colm Toibin, Leila Slimani and Hala Alyan. The 31st winner of the Dublin Literary Award will be announced and there is also a celebration of the most widely translated and adapted work by an Irish author, Gulliver’s Travels, which turns three hundred in 2026.

Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival (15-27 May), the largest regional literary event in Western Australia, has Sarah Wilson, Susan Choi, David Szalay and AC Grayling in this year’s line up.

The Franschhoek Literary Festival (15-17 May) features a powerful line-up of international, pan-African and South African authors including Alka Joshi, Charlie Mackesy, Peter Frankopan, Tan Twan Eng, Francis Fukuyama, Deon Meyer and Justice Malala.

The 37th Charleston Festival, in Lewes, East Sussex, UK features Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Sandi Toksvig, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Olly Alexander, Susanna Clarke, Rose Wylie, Ocean Vuong, Kae Tempest, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Michael Heseltine and many more.

The Gibraltar Literary Festival (9–15 November 2026) has announced the first 14 authors for this year’s programme, promising a varied line-up across politics, history, mental health, sport, music, and fiction. Among the headline names, international bestseller Arturo Pérez-Reverte will present his latest works (Enviado Especial and Misión en París, in Spanish), while Joanne Harris MBE returns with Vianne and her forthcoming novel Sleepers in the Snow. Anne Sebba will discuss The Women Orchestra of Auschwitz, and Khaleda Popal, winner of the 2025 Sports Book of the Year, shares her powerful memoir My Beautiful Sisters.

Industry News

Marianne Boruch is the winner of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award given to “an American poet of exceptional talent.” Established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize is bestowed annually by Poets & Writers and named for the John and Susan Jackson family.

Best-selling novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage in filing a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the New York Times reports. “The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.”

USA Today visits Audible Story House, the world’s first bookless bookstore now open in New York City. The store, which is free and open to the public Wednesdays through Sundays during May, features more than three hundred audiobook titles that customers can sample.

Oprah Winfrey has selected John of John (Grove Atlantic, 2026), the third novel by Douglas Stuart, for her book club, the Associated Press reports. The best-selling author won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Shuggie Bain (Grove Atlantic 2020).

The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The winner in poetry is Juliana Spahr for Ars Poetica (Wesleyan University Press); the finalists are Douglas Kearney for I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books) and The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith. The winner in fiction is Daniel Kraus for Angel Down (Atria Books); the finalists are Katie Kitamura for Audition (Riverhead Books) and Torrey Peters for Stag Dance: A Quartet(Random House). The winner in memoir/autobiography is Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG); the finalists are Anelise Chen for Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World), Sarah Chihaya for Bibliophobia (Random House), and Hala Alyan for I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader Press).

TIME Magazine has listed Bookshop.org as one of “The 10 Most Influential Social Good Companies of 2026,” alongside Dr. Bronner’s, Land O’Lakes, and Bombas. Last year, the company that is known for saving independent bookshops provided a record $9.5 million to local bookstores.

Lisbon’s lost library: how a cultural jewel ended up in a basement. Backed by Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, an extraordinary collection remains hidden from readers as red tape and a stalled restoration leave plans in limbo. Read more in The Times

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