Festival News

Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (North Yorkshire, England) is running July 23–26, the world’s largest and most famous crime-writing festival featuring leading thriller and mystery authors. This year’s programming chair is Lisa Jewell ‘Queen of the psychological thriller’, with the lineup featuring David Baldacci, Ann Cleeves, Brenda Blethyn, Anthony Horowitz, Holly Jackson, Chris Brookmyre, Jane Harper, LJ Ross, Chris Whitaker Gillian McAllister, Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall, Mick Herron, Harriet Tyce, Richard Armitage, Ardal O’Hanlon, Denise Mina, Adam Kay, Abir Mukherjee, Vaseem Khan and Val McDermid.

After a resounding success and consecutive sold out events, the Muslim Literary Festival is set to return to Toronto on 8 August for its third year. Canada’s only literary festival for Muslim writers connects upcoming talent often underrepresented in mainstream publishing with Canadian editors, publishers, and literary agents. This year’s theme, Humans at Heart: Stories that Beat as One, focuses on shared humanity and how personal experiences can shape universal stories.

Lisbon Lit Days (lld, 28–30 October 2026), supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, will feature readings with David Van Reybrouck, Radka Denemarková, Dorota Masłowska, Tadeusz Dąbrowski, Andrey Kurkov and Ilya Kaminsky. Running alongside will be the international congress “And Now? – The Literary Sector in a Time of Political Upheaval.” Discussions will focus on the impact of geopolitical conflicts on the international literary sector and the implications of artificial intelligence for literature and in particular, literary translation. IId is directed by Ulrich Schreiber, with Alberto Manguel serving as its president. Registration and participation (online or in person) for the congress remains open until 15 August 2026. Contact: www.bebelplatz.org.

Industry News

Every child in year 6 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and P6 in Scotland, will be given the bestselling book Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell this Christmas, to coincide with the end of the government’s National Year of Reading, through The Queen’s Christmas Present initiative.

A children’s literature festival has been criticised after requests that comments on diversity be deleted, with organisers saying that social media posts had been incorrect.

English Pen’s flagship grant programme PEN Translates has named 14 titles from 13 publishers, seven languages and eight regions as its latest winners. Books from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Bolivia, Ukraine and Japan are amongst the award winners.

Amazon has announced the recipients of its 2026 Amazon Literary Partnership. The program provides $1 million in grants to 102 literary organisations, including the National Book Foundation’s Five Under 35 Program, events including the Brooklyn Book Festival, residencies like Yaddo and Ucross, literary magazines including Electric Literature, poetry organizations such as CantoMundo and Poetry Daily, and nonprofit publishers like Graywolf Press and Deep Vellum, as well as organizations that support young writers and those specifically focused on literary life in the South. First-time grantees include the National Book Critics Circle and 826 National.

A federal judge in San Francisco officially approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by authors who accused the company of violating copyright by using their books to train its AI chatbot, Publishers Lunchwrites. The settlement was preliminarily approved last September. Justin Nelson, the lead attorney for the authors, said that this “is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.” A total of 440,490 works should receive payments of around $3,127 per work.

Wang Jibing, a food delivery rider who writes poems on slips of paper between deliveries, has been awarded the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top literary awards, according to the BBC. Wang, who is 56, became a delivery driver in 2019 after several decades of odd jobs. At the same time, he started posting his poems and essays, many of which were about his work, on social media and eventually gained a following. Low Flight, the collection that earned him the Lu Xun Literary Prize, was published by Beijing United Publishing in China in 2024 and is being published in English later this year by Chax Press.

Earlier this week five people were arrested “on suspicion of selling allegedly seditious publications” in a raid of two bookstores in Hong Kong, according to the Guardian. Multiple media outlets shared videos and photos showing officers removing materials from Have A Nice Stay and Greenfield Book Store. The authorities are citing a 2024 national security law stating that the displaying or selling of items with “seditious intention” is punishable by up to seven years in prison. “If you are a bookseller, you have a responsibility to ensure that the books you sell do not endanger national security,” the city’s security chief, Chris Tang, was quoted as saying.

A recent report from Public First, with additional research from EY, found that in 2025 TikTok helped generate £175m in consumer spending on books and concluded that one in four 18–24-year-olds on TikTok bought a book after seeing it on the platform.

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