Festival News

The Northern Territory Writers Festival is underway until Sunday in Darwin Australia with the theme “Navigating”. Panels, workshops and conversations include appearances by Omar Musa, Hannah Moloney, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Djon Mundine, and Zoe Terakes.

The Norwegian Festival of Literature will take place 1 to 7 June in Lillehammer. Throughout the week, there will be around 280 events and more than 400 authors and artists on stage. Through a program packed with some of Europe’s most interesting contemporary authors, they will explore where Europe is headed, whether there is a common European literary heritage, and what unites and what divides today’s European authors. Guests include Ali Smith, Sara Stridsberg, Elif Shafak, David Szalay, and Georgi Gospodinov.

It’s a busy weekend for festivals worldwide:

The International Book Arsenal Festival takes place in Kyiv, Ukraine, (28-31 May) bringing together more than 150 participants with discussions and lectures, readings and workshops, meetings with authors and presentations of new publications, as well as music and performance programs, exhibitions and many other attractions.

The Essex Book Festival (28 May -28 June) with locations across one of England’s largest counties, has Sarah Perry, Tim Marshall and Harriet Tyce in its programme

The Bay Area Book Festival in on in California (29-31 May) with nearly 400 authors appearing in mostly free events at the annual festival in Downtown Berkeley, May 29–31.  Nnedi Okorafor, author of Africanfuturist fiction, and Marshall Ganz, an architect of modern grassroots leadership models, are amongst the headlines, which include Tananarive Due and Stephen Graham Jones

Flup, the literary festival of the flavellas, is taking place in Rio de Janeiro, 30 May -7 June, with writing workshops, poetry slams and readings. This year’s theme is 100 years of Black Modernism

The Festival du premier roman de Chambéry is currently taking place in France (27-31 May)

Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s oldest literary and arts festival where writers, artists and poets gather in the beautiful Kerry heritage town of Listowel in Co Kerry, is happening this weekend, 27-31 May. Nicola Sturgeon, Andrew O’Hagan and Anya Bergman are in the programme

Talinn HeadRead Festival (27-31 May ) has taken place for the twelfth year in Estonia, with international guests and Estonian authors celebrating poetry, prose and non-fiction.

Bengaluru celebrated its very first crime lit fest, Dead Write, on 23-24 May at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), Domlur.

Sydney Writers’ Festival has wrapped up its 2026 program with the biggest attendance figures in the event’s 29-year history, marking a second consecutive year of record-breaking crowds and ticket sales. More than 100,000 people attended the festival from 17 to 24 May, with audiences packing out more than 200 events featuring over 250 writers, thinkers and cultural figures. Organisers said more than 55 per cent of events sold out across the week.

Industry News

A ‘darkly comic’ exploration of displacement and identity in the UK asylum system and a re-examination of the extraordinary life of the only king in Haiti’s history have won the James Tait Black Prizes.  Established in 1919, they are the UK’s oldest literary prizes and are judged by University of Edinburgh literature scholars and students.  The fiction prize goes to On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis (Peirene Press), while The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut (Yale University Press) wins the biography prize

Bundjalung writer and artist Bronwyn Bancroft is one of the recipients of the 2026 Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Artistic Excellence in the Australian First Nations Arts and Culture Awards. Valued at $AUD60,000, the award recognises “outstanding lifetime achievement in artistic practice for a senior Australian First Nations artist” and is administered by Creative Australia. “Bronwyn has contributed extensively to Indigenous and Australian children’s literature, authoring/illustrating 50 children’s books,” said Creative Australia. In addition, Bancroft’s work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, and is held in major Australian galleries, state libraries and international collections.

In the wake of last week’s revelations that an AI detection tool raised red flags about a Commonwealth Prize-winning short story, the Authors Guild put five of the top AI detection tools to the test to see how likely they are to mistakenly flag human-written work as AI-generated. The Authors Guild selected 10 of its articles published in 2022 or earlier, before generative AI was widely available, and ran them through the five AI detectors. Three were almost entirely accurate, while two—ZeroGPT and Sidekicker.ai—were either unpredictable or totally inaccurate. Ironically, the Authors Guild points out, because AI models are trained on polished writing, “The more refined and controlled a writer’s style, the more it may resemble the output these tools are designed to flag. This creates a troubling paradox. A writer who has spent decades honing clarity, economy, and precision is, by definition, writing in a way that overlaps with what AI has learned to produce.”

A 2022 reprint of the 2006 young adult novel Pretty Little Liars has generated backlash online because it replaced references to the early aughts with more current mentions of TikTok, Snapchat, and Billie Eilish, the New York Timesreports. Modernisation, or updating cultural and technological references, has long been a practice in publishing, especially in middle-grade and young adult books. Proponents of this strategy say that dated references can prevent younger readers from feeling fully engrossed in a story and even sometimes from simply understanding what’s going on. But others argue that there’s something to be said for trusting young readers.

Last week Spotify introduced a new AI-powered tool for self-publishing audiobooks, TechCrunch reports. Powered by the AI voice generator ElevenLabs, the tool will be rolled out within the Spotify for Authors platform starting this June, albeit initially by invitation only.

For readers struggling to focus on words on the page, NPR suggests trying immersive reading. This strategy entails listening to an audiobook and following along in a physical copy of the book at the same time. It is often used to support students with dyslexia and ADHD and has recently become popular among online communities of readers.

Earlier this week, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against Anna’s Archive, according to Publishers Weekly.

A novel featuring a protagonist whose job is taken by AI has won the Climate fiction prize. Hum by Helen Phillips, the American writer’s third novel, is about a woman, May, who loses her job to a “hum” of the title – a humanoid robot. The prize, worth £10,000, was first awarded last year to Abi Daré for And So I Roar, the follow-up to her bestselling debut The Girl with the Louding Voice. 

Ian McEwan says pessimism “a bigger problem than climate change”, The Guardian reports. Speaking at the Hay festival as the UK breaks May heat record, the author says optimism is a “moral duty”.

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