Jon’s “definitive” (Mojo, Five Stars) and “extraordinary” (Nicholas Lezard) biography of Joy Division, one of the twentieth century’s most influential rock bands, has been named Rough Trade’s UK Book of the Year, a few months after it hit the Sunday Times Bestseller list. Rough Trade said: “In This Searing Light, the Sun, and Everything Else,… Read more »
Unanimously chosen by a panel of five judges, Peter Frankopan has won the €20,000 Calliope Prize, awarded biennially by the German Emigration Centre for practical research into migration. The jury commented that “Frankopan’s research on global history, embodied in his work The Silk Roads, breaks with the Eurocentric perspective and explores new perspectives on historical… Read more »
Writer, presenter and ‘undercover economist’ Tim Harford has launched an exciting new podcast, Cautionary Tales, with Pushkin Industries, a company co-founded by Jacob Weisberg and non-fiction megastar Malcolm Gladwell. We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable life lessons, but these Cautionary Tales are for the education of the grown ups –… Read more »
Waterstones has released its annual Paperback of the Year list and we are delighted to see four of our authors feature. Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet and Lords of the Desert: Britain’s Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle-East were both previously Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month picks, while Middle… Read more »
Congratulazioni to David Almond and Meg Rosoff, who have been announced as winners of this year’s prestigious Premio Letteratura Ragazzi, an international prize awarded to the best books for children published in Italy. David’s book The Dam (La Diga), illustrated by Levi Pinfold and published by Walker Books (UK) and Salani (Italy), triumphed in the… Read more »
Nominations were released today for the prestigious Carnegie and Greenaway medals, awarded to books written in English for children and young people that create an outstanding reading experiences through writing and illustration, respectively. And our authors made a very good showing indeed. FBA’ers nominated for the Carnegie Medal were… Linda Newbery, with The Key to… Read more »
When you think back to Christmases past, what (if anything) made it magical? Looking towards the future, what would your perfect Christmas be? What would you change? What should we all change? Today marks the release of a very special Christmas book – Last Christmas ties in with the upcoming festive blockbuster, but is so… Read more »
The clocks have run backwards and All Hallows’ Eve is almost upon us, so this month we’ve decided to question the FBA offices about the scariest books ever written. But first, what’s been happening in October? Well, across the country, an F word has been on everyone’s lips, but in the book world that F… Read more »
Middle England, Jonathan Coe’s latest novel and the third in his Rotter’s Club series, has been shortlisted for one of France’s most prestigious literary awards. Le Coeur de l’Angleterre – which has also hit the French bestseller lists – will compete for the prize with Edna O’Brien, Giosuè Calaciura, Manuel Vilas, and Arno Geiger, who… Read more »
On Thursday evening we were honoured to be invited by Blackwell’s to their Annual Lecture, given this year by British-Turkish writer activist, Elif Shafak, whose latest Booker-shortlisted novel, Ten Minutes Thirty-Eight Seconds In This Strange World, was called “a masterpiece” by our very own Peter Frankopan. Speaking eloquently on politics, identity, feminism, and narratives of… Read more »