Festival News

Want to put your festival in the spotlight? Send us your highlights video so we can feature it on the GAoLF homepage. See the website for more details.

As it’s the holiday season in many parts of the world, we will be taking a break, returning in September with your festival updates. Festivals taking place in August include:

Edinburgh International Book Festival (15 -30 August) will have 600 events over 16 days featuring award winning authors John Grisham, Colson Whitehead, Matt Haig, Elif Shafak, Ian Rankin, Maggie O’Farrell, Ann Patchett, Ali Smith, Colm Toíbín and 2026 International Booker Prize winner Yáng Shuāng-zi. The programme also features former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, award-winning poet Claudia Rankine and historian David Olusoga. This year the Festival includes a three-day industry event, Global Ink.

Byron Bay, New South Wales famous beachside town, hosts its festival, 14-16 August. Byron Writers Festival has conversations with Richard Flanagan, the only author to have won both the Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize, philosopher Roman Krznaric, India’s International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree and global best-selling author Meg Mason.

Book Brahma will be held in Bengaluru, 21-23 August, celebrating India’s literature, language and culture with three days of conversations, debates, and literary discovery.

Set against the stunning backdrop of Scotland’s whisky isle, Islay Book Festival will take place 27-30 August. Louise Welsh, Douglas Stewart, Jenni Fagan and C.J. Cooke are amongst the speakers taking part in this community, volunteer-led event.

Zadie Smith, Patti Smith and Mustafa are among the star names lined up to be interviewed by Dua Lipa, as the pop star reveals her curation of this year’s London Literature festival at the Southbank Centre. The festival, now in its 19th year, will run from 21 October to 1 November.

Industry News

Scholastic has reported a 3% drop in total revenue for the fiscal year ended 31 May 2026, reports Publishers Weekly. According to Scholastic’s latest financial release, revenue dropped to US$1.58 billion from US$1.62 billion, and operating income fell to US$15.2 million from US$15.8 million in the prior year. In the company’s international segment, revenue fell 1% from US$279.6 million to US$277.2 million; however, operating income excluding one-time items was up 145% to US$7.1 million from US$2.9 million the previous year.

The winners of the 2026 Aotearoa New Zealand Book Industry Awards have been announced by Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand and the Publishers Association of New Zealand/Te Rau o Tākupu (PANZ). The winners are: Publisher of the Year – Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand; NielsenIQ BookData NZ Award – A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern; Marketing and Publicity Strategy of the Year – A Different Kind of Power (Penguin Random House).

A new study conducted by computer scientists using A.I. detection software to analyse thousands of self-published novels on Amazon, found that a substantial number of those novels contained chatbot-generated prose.

For the Atlantic, Will Oremus examines the meteoric success of Daggermouth, a novel writer H. M. Wolfe self-published in 2025, for which Simon & Schuster subsequently paid seven figures. Academics studying AI writing also think it may have been substantially written by AI, though Wolfe denies these allegations. If it turns out he did use the help of a chatbot, then Daggermouth may prove that AI doesn’t just write slop anymore. “Everyone thinks they can tell AI writing,” Christine Larson, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the effect of technology on creative work, is quoted saying. “But I don’t think we can tell so much.”

Thanks to the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey, readers are flocking to the original text, according to USA Today. Sales of all translations are up 76 percent year-to-date, and e-book checkouts through Libby have increased 217 percent compared to this time last year. Sales of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the epic in particular are booming, and her version also accounts for 90 percent of print holds and 57 percent of e-book and audiobook holds in the New York Public Library system, one of the largest in the country. Wilson uses modern language in her translation, and she is quoted explaining that, “English—all registers of English, all dialects—is a modern language; authenticity on that level is impossible unless you’re going to compose a script entirely in Homeric Greek—which would be very fun but unlikely to do well at the box office.”

The off-screen drama surrounding Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster version of the Odyssey stepped up a gear overnight, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates sought to defend the film-maker from an attack by classicist Emily Wilson. Writing on X, Oates took issue with the style as well as the rhetoric of Wilson’s essay published earlier this week in the London Review of Books, in which the academic, who published a landmark translation of Homer’s epic poem in 2017, wrote that Nolan’s film lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” and had “nothing convincing to say”.

The Booker Prize has announced its 2026 longlist: thirteen novels published in the U.K. or Ireland between October 1, 2025, and September 30, 2026. The longlist titles were selected from a pool of 163 works and were written by authors from seven countries: Jamaica, Mexico, Turkey, England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States. “We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone,” Mary Beard, the chair of this year’s judges, says. “There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock.” The nominated books (and their U.K. publishers) are: The Shadow of the Object (Chatto & Windus) by Chloe Aridjis, Switzy(Chatto & Windus) by Emma Cline, Helen of Nowhere (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Makenna Goodman, The End of Everything (Serpent’s Tail) by M. John Harrison, The Disappearers (Hamish Hamilton) by Marlon James, Black Bag(John Murray) by Luke Kennard, The Renovation (Hamish Hamilton) by Kenan Orhan, May We Feed the King (Granta) by Rebecca Perry, The Palm House (Picador) by Gwendoline Riley, The Things We Never Say (Viking) by Elizabeth Strout, John of John (Picador) by Douglas Stuart, All Them Dogs (John Murray) by Djamel White, and The Vivisectors(4th Estate) by Missouri Williams.

Filba Foundation has announced the long list for its 2026 Fundación Medifé Filba Award, wich selects the best Argentine novel of the previous year. The nominated books are Cicuta para los oídos, by Sebastián Hacher (Eterna Cadencia); El paraguas de Chéjov by Pablo Colacrai (Pre-textos); Hija biográfica by Romina Paula (Entropía); Historia natural by Marina Yuszczuk (Blatt & Ríos); Kurepa by Martín Sancia Kawamichi (La Crujía); La madre de Beckett tenía un burro by Matías Battistón (Emecé); La merma by María Moreno (Random House); López López by Tomás Downey (Fiordo); Si estás leyendo esto by Kike Ferrari (Fondo de Cultura Económica), and Si sintieras bajo los pies las estructuras mayoresby Roberto Chuit Roganovich (Alfaguara). Jury Members Gabriel Cabezón Cámara, Alan Pauls and Leila Guerriero will announce the winning novel in November.

Salman Rushdie testified against Hadi Matar, the man who repeatedly stabbed him in 2022, was convicted of attempted murder on state charges and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison last year, and is now on trial for federal crimes, the New York Times reports. The federal charges allege that Matar not only tried to kill the acclaimed author but that “he had acted at the direction of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, and committed an act of terror by enforcing the fatwa, a religious edict.” If convicted on “two counts of providing material support to a terrorist group, and one count of terrorism that transcends national boundaries,” Matar could be sentenced to life in prison.

Actress Natalie Portman denies a bust-up with Rachel Cusk over Life of M. The author’s book offers an unflattering portrait with strange parallels to Portman’s life.

Don’t forget to update your festival dates for 2027, to make sure you won’t miss out on being featured in the updates. Just log into your account to make the updates. Remember to send us your latest news so that we can include it. This round-up is intended for GAoLF members only.

You can explore more content via the association’s website here and discuss topics in the forum with other member festivals here.