Festival News

The 21st Brooklyn Book Festival begins on 20 September in New York City running until 28 September. Features include a Virtual Festival Day this Sunday, city-wide Bookend events across all five boroughs, Children’s Day, and the flagship Festival Day and Literary Marketplace in Downtown Brooklyn on 27 September. The festival programme includes over 160 events featuring nearly 500 national and international authors, emphasizing inclusive literary programming free to the public. Speakers include Marlon James, Joyce Carol Oates, Namwali Serpell, Douglas Stuart, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Colson Whitehead, Tracy K. Smith, Cristina Rivera Garza, Julia Angwin, R.J. Palacio and Bess Kalb.

The 27th Wigtown Book Festival is on 25 September in Scotland until 4 October. Celebrations kick off on opening night with a traditional bagpipe procession through Scotland’s National Book Town followed by fireworks and a hog roast. The festival programme includes over 250 events with special themes ranging from Scottish debut novels to witchcraft, alongside live music, film, and guided walks. Speakers include Bill Paterson, Lucy Porter, Sam Heughan, Sophie Raworth, Mathijs Deen, Harriet Tyce, Isla Rosser-Owen and Stuart Kelly.

The 11th Mississippi Book Festival takes place 26 September in Jackson, Mississippi. During the annual “Literary Lawn Party,” thousands of readers gather at the historic State Capitol grounds, the Capitol Rotunda, and nearby Galloway United Methodist Church. The festival programme includes over 40 panel discussions alongside a street marketplace for booksellers, Authors Alley for self-published writers, interactive children’s activities, and an after-hours biergarten book drop. Speakers include Elizabeth Agyemang, Maryemma Graham, Seretha Williams, Randal Jelks, Ashanté Reese and numerous regional and national authors.

The British Library presents its first American Writers’ Week from 28 September – 2 October, a unique five‑day series of conversations with some of the most essential voices in contemporary American literature: Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Rabih Alameddine, Jeanine Cummins, Daniel Kraus, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Katie Kitamura. The week marks the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States, and is presented in association with Festival America, Paris.

The Cambridge Literary Festival (UK) is on 21- 22 November for its winter edition with former children’s laureates Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Michael Morpurgo reflecting on the National Year of Reading, while Deborah Levy delivers her postponed Room of One’s Own Lecture. The festival programme focuses on international affairs, war in Ukraine, women’s rights in Afghanistan, contemporary fiction, and UK politics, culminating in a closing lecture on the USA in its 250th year. Speakers also include Emily Wilson, Hermione Lee, Alice Oswald, Elif Shafak, Patrick Gale, A.K. Blakemore, Lynda La Plante, Andrey Kurkov, Sasha Dovzhyk, Charlotte Higgins, Marina Litvinenko, Zahra Joya, Karen Bartlett, Laura Kuenssberg and Sarah Churchwell.

The important role that festivals play in the publishing world will be the topic under discussion at Frankfurt Book Fair at 4pm on 7 October. Join Lavinia Frey ILB (International Literature Festival Berlin), Isobel Abulhoul Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, Julie Finch Hay Festival Global, Nermin Mollaoglu ITEF – Istanbul International Literature Festival and Govind Deecee Kerala Literature Festival for Literature Festivals in a Changing World: Culture, Community, and the Power of Stories

If you are going to Frankfurt and would like to join the GAoLF networking reception that follows the discussion, email carmel.rosato@emirateslitfest.com for an invitation.

Want to put your festival in the spotlight? Send us your highlights video so we can feature it on the GAoLF homepage. Hay Global is this week’s featured festival. See the website for more details.

Industry News

In Singapore, the city-state’s government is paying its citizens to read, reports the Guardian. Using the government citizen engagement platform CrowdTask SG, users can track their daily reading time and earn virtual rewards as part of a challenge launched by the National Library Board (NLB) this month. Under the scheme, readers accrue points that can be redeemed for a few cents. People will have to log 50 daily reading sessions to earn S$1. A session of 15 minutes or more is rewarded with 20 virtual coins, with 1000 coins needed for a dollar payment. One reading session is allowed daily.

In the UK, new “independent international publisher” High Line Publishing Studio has launched under the leadership of former Hodder & Stoughton managing director Oliver Malcolm as CEO. It is “backed by a coalition of publishing, media and philanthropic investors including literary agent Neil Blair, to champion distinctive voices that might otherwise be missed,” reports the Bookseller. The publisher launches with two founding imprints: Odessa Editions, to be led by Jacky Klein with a focus on Jewish and Israeli writing across fiction and nonfiction; and Antidote Books, led by Joel Simons and publishing nonfiction across areas including technology, ethics, democracy, identity and power. Author Lee Child will act as High Line’s international spokesperson and sit on its advisory committee.

India’s print book market is worth an estimated US$10.1 billion, while its digital publishing market is worth approximately US$0.7 billion, according to a new report from NielsenIQ BookData and the Federation of Indian Publishers. The India Book Market Report 2026–2030 found that the Indian market is broadening: “Education remains the foundation, but growth is also emerging in trade books, children’s content, professional learning, Indian-language publishing, research and lifelong learning,” it said in an executive summary. The report estimated that the scholarly journals market in India is worth US$0.5 billion, and that the printing and publishing sector employs approximately 375,000 people.

The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction. “The 2026 Fiction Longlist features two debut novels among the ten titles and six authors on the Longlist have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation,” the organization wrote in a press release. The titles on the longlist are:Paradiso 17 (Knopf) by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Red Ants (Counterpoint Press) by Kimberly Blaeser, Dèy (Knopf) by Edwidge Danticat, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You (Liveright) by Julián Delgado Lopera, Python’s Kiss (Harper) by Louise Erdrich, The Disappearers (Riverhead Books) by Marlon James, Beginning Middle End (Knopf) by Valeria Luiselli,Passengers (Europa Editions) by Alexander Maksik, The Renovation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Kenan Orhan, and Mad Eden (MCD) by Morgan Thomas.

For WIRED, journalist Joel Khalili talks to some of the readers who have made a hobby of using AI to bring their story ideas to life. Recently, researchers took a look at this AI fiction fans and found that for some, the AI-authored nature of the work is part of the draw. Some of the people who craft these tales enjoy the obsessive iterating that AI can accomodate, while others like being able to read stories where they direct the action. “There are a lot of qualities of AI models that are different from what human writers have that are actually appealing to at least some segment of users,” Melanie Walsh,a professor at the University of Washington Information School and coauthor of the study, said. “These models are judgment-free; they can produce stories instantaneously; they are nearly inexhaustible.”

For Publishers Weekly, Sam Spratford examines the ways in which AI technology is—and isn’t—impacting the work of translation. On one end of the spectrum, HarperCollins’ CEO said earlier this year that the publisher aims to automate overseas translations. Critics of this technology, meanwhile, have spoken about the importance of a human touch and the danger of turning translators into people who edit AI translations rather than interpret the original text themselves. “If we think of the literary translation of a book as a cover song, just imagine if Jimi Hendrix had been asked to post-edit an AI cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ instead of creating his unique take on the song,” Katrine Øgaard Jensen, the executive director of the American Literary Translators Association, said. Others remain largely unconcerned; AI translations, they argue, still trail behind the best literary work by humans.

Last week the Poetry Foundation announced the recipients of its 2026 Pegasus Awards, a suite of prizes that recognize poetry craft, service, and criticism. These include the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award that went to Robert Pinsky; the Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, a $25,000 prize that was awarded to Luis J. Rodriguez whose wide-ranging career has included founding Tia Chucha Press; and the $50,000 prize for the Young People’s Poet Laureate, which acknowledges exceptional poetry written for young readers and went to Nikki Grimes. “This year is special because it marks four decades of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, twenty years of the Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the first year of the Pegasus Poetry Book Prize,” Michelle T. Boone, the president and CEO of the Poetry Foundation, said in a statement. The winners will receive their awards at a private ceremony in Chicago next month.

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