Festival News

Filba International Festival (Argentina) will be on 30 September to 4 October in Buenos Aires. Headliners include Claire Keegan, Emmanuel Carrère, and Camila Sosa Villada. Other highlights include panel discussions with filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, a live podcast recording with Lucía Lijtmaer and Isa Calderón, and writing workshops with Sebastiano Mauri. The festival has a main theme that focuses on habitat, ways of living and the city. See the full programme

Bath Children’s Literature Festival (UK) runs from 25 September to 4 October 2026 and brings together some of the biggest names in children’s and young adult literature for a programme of events, storytelling and creative activities. Headline names this year include Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, Katherine Rundell, Cressida Cowell, A.F. Steadman, Michael Rosen, Jacqueline Wilson, Ben Miller, Alexander Armstrong and Greg James, alongside many leading illustrators and children’s authors.

Contains Strong Language takes place in Salford from 24–27 September 2026, marking its 10th anniversary. Co-produced by the BBC and National Poetry Centre, it is the UK’s largest poetry and performance festival, with a particularly strong programme of spoken word, live performance and broadcast events. The headline line-up includes John Cooper Clarke, Jackie Kay, Joelle Taylor, Jason Allen-Paisant, Alice Oswald, Owen Sheers, Liz Berry, Andrew McMillan and Testament, with a major highlight being a conversation between Simon Armitage and John Cooper Clarke, alongside BBC Radio and BBC Philharmonic collaborations.

Manchester Literature Festival officially runs 9–25 October, although its 2026 programme begins with events in late September. The first major event is Marina Hyde on 28 September, followed by Queered Up Now on 30 September. The main programme features a substantial international line-up including Maggie O’Farrell, Kate Atkinson, Emily St. John Mandel, Bernardine Evaristo, Russell T Davies, Elif Shafak, Jackie Kay, Patrick Radden Keefe, Simon Armitage, Min Jin Lee, Hernan Diaz and Lee Child, among many others

The International Literature Festival Berlin has announced that its future has been secured for the long term. After more than 25 years, the festival is to receive institutional funding by the Federal Government and become part of the Berliner Festspiele. Festival director Lavinia Frey said: “The ILB is heading into a secure future. We look forward to becoming part of the Berliner Festspiele’s festival family and hope for a boost in synergies and creativity.” The news follows a successful festival which closed on 16 September, with 25,000 visitors, 25 sold-out events, occupancy rise to 85 per cent, the Young Program reaching almost 3,000 more readers than last year, and the sold-out launch of the new series Satzwechsel with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Nobel laureate Han Kang.

Industry News

This year’s Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. Previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are in the running once more, along with Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout and prominent British speculative fiction writer M John Harrison. Novelist and poet Luke Kennard and debut novelist Rebecca Perry are also in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 9 November.

The federal government arts body, Creative Australia, has awarded $AUD80,000 creative fellowships to poet Judith Bishop, translator Alison Entrekin, and author and playwright Jane Harrison.

Unsealed documents from the Open AI/Microsoft copyright infringement case show that executives knew that they were illegally training their LLM on copyrighted material, Publishers Weekly reports. What’s more, they expressed awareness that the publishing industry would suffer as a result of their work. One note from August 2019 puts it bluntly: “We trained GPT-3 on pirated stuff! No sharing that!” This news comes less than two weeks after the Authors Guild and Open AI/Microsoft filed for summary judgment.

Merriam-Webster is adding 1400 words and definitions to its dictionary, NBC News reports. The new terms include “shapewear,” “looksmaxxing,” and “parasocial.” In a press release, the publisher said that “the new entries reflect words and meanings that have demonstrated widespread use over time, offering a window into the world today.”

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation has announced the winners of its 2026 awards, given annually to books “that have led readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.” The fiction award went to Sam Wachman for The Sunflower Boys.

The Times has an article on the rise of Dutch bookshops that have no Dutch books. Read more hereA Shakespeare library and archive containing 6,000 books opens under the Globe theatre in London.

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