Festival News

The International Literature Festival of Paraty, Flip, Brazil’s biggest literary festival, runs from July 22 to 26 in the UNESCO recognised old colonial town. This year’s edition celebrates the late poet Orides Fontela, with all 21 main panels named after lines of her verse. Headliners include Zadie Smith, Goncourt winner Kamel Daoud and Camoes laureate Ana Paula Tavares. Supreme Court justice Carmen Lucia will appear to launch a book on democracy, amid Brazil’s coup-plot trials.

The programme for Wigtown Book Festival goes live on 22 July. Taking part in Scotland’s book town festival 25 September – 4 October, the line-up includes novelist and broadcaster Sally Magnusson; award-winning BATFTA screen writer, Neil Forsyth; Travis bass player and  children’s author Dougie Payne; actor Larry Lamb on his colourful life and career, told through poetry; Scottish crime writer and Traitors star Harriet Tyce and former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival has unveiled the lineup of authors who will be heading to the Devon seaside town 23-27 September. Authors celebrating books by the sea are Bryony Gordon, Caroline Quentin, Jasmine Elmer, Patrick Gale, Rachael Stirling, Liz Earle and Dawn O’Porter. History and politics are represented with talks from Lord Peter Ricketts, James Holland, John Crace, Luke Harding, Paul Mason and Damien Lewis.

Newcastle Writers Festival has promoted programme manager Amy Lovat to the role of artistic director and appointed Tristan Sharp as managing director following the departure of founding director Rosemarie Milsom after 14 years.

Industry News

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. Read Rose Horowitch’s essay for The Atlantic.

Rebecca Perry wins Waterstones debut fiction prize for ‘delicious and dream-like’ novel. May We Feed the King, about a museum curator and a medieval monarch, was praised by judges for its ‘crisp, cool prose’ and ‘poet’s eye for detail’.

Bloomsbury Publishing expects record revenue of £354 million for the 2027 fiscal year, Publishers Weekly reports. These strong projected sales numbers are thanks in large part to several new titles from bestselling authors including Sarah J. Maas, as well as the new Harry Potter TV series coming to HBO later this year, which is expected to boost sales of the novels.

A collection of Stephen King novellas that inspired classic films including Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption has been banned from Utah public schools.

Joe Biden is to publish his memoir after the November midterms. Promise Me, America  will cover everything in his presidency from the economy to his decision to drop bid for re-election.

For the Atlantic, writer Will Oremus parses one of AI’s signature writing tics: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” It’s become clear that chatbots have taken their affinity for negative parallelism one step too far, he writes, but unlike other AI tells—like, for example, the use of the word “delve”—AI companies have yet to figure out how to iron out this kink. This could be because human reviewers of AI models tended to give these phrases high marks, or because this sentence construction enables models to strike a balance between a clever word choice and one that’s more obvious. “The trade-off, for human writers, is that a once-potent rhetorical device is now a cliché that makes you sound like a bot,” Oremus points out. Ironically, “a recent study by researchers in Germany suggested that AI’s writing tics are now cropping up more in spontaneous human conversation. If that continues, maybe negative parallelism will eventually lose its status as an AI writing tell after all.”

Tegan Nia Swanson has been named the winner of the 2026 DAG Prize for Literature. The United States award provides $20,000 to an emerging prose writer whose work hasn’t yet received widespread recognition but demonstrates potential for innovation, “for example, at the level of form, content, or genre. What more can prose literature be? What more can it do?” Swanson is the author of the novel Things We Found When the Water Went Down (Catapult, 2022) and is at work on her sophomore book, We Do Not Dream of Salt Plagues, a “climate gothic love letter to queer and trans community.” The finalists for the DAG Prize for Literature are Sophia Terazawa, Marcus Clayton, Maddie Norris, Ali Raz, Jefferey Spivey, and Mihret Sibhat.

Novelist Dinaw Mengestu has resigned from his post as president of PEN America, according to Publishers Weekly. Mengestu wrote on Instagram that he had left the organisation because of PEN’s “ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably, and about its production of work that supports suppression through bigotry and indifference”. He was referencing a recent report from the organisation on the “rising isolation and exclusion” of Israeli and Jewish writers, which draws on interviews with more than 30 writers who expressed concern about isolation and harassment they say they’ve experienced since October 7, 2023. PEN America officially opposes academic and cultural boycotts, which Mengestu says he sees as a “form of dialogue”.

Nine out of 10 bestselling novels in the UK have one thing in common: a woman is murdered, The Guardian reports.

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