Prizes

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

The plot: Under lock and key until publication day on 10 September, The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale and follows the lives of three women in Gilead.

What we said: Nothing yet! But it is set to be one of the biggest books of the year.

Rape, infighting, secrets, financial malpractice; the scandal surrounding the Nobel Prize in Literature began in November 2017 when Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published allegations by eighteen women that they had been sexually assaulted by Jean-Claude Arnault, a 71-year-old Swedish-French photographer.  Read more

The winner of Australia's richest literary prize did not attend the ceremony.

His absence was not by choice.

Behrouz Boochani, whose debut book won both the $25,000 non-fiction prize at the Victorian premier's literary awards and the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature on Thursday night, is not allowed into Australia.

Poet Hannah Sullivan has won the prestigious and lucrative TS Eliot prize for her first collection Three Poems - just the third debut to land the award in its 25-year history, and a sign that the poetry world is hunting for a new generation of voices.  Read more

When public discourse denigrates expertise, when politicians and Twitter trolls alike have learned to dismiss every criticism or uncomfortable truth as "fake" and media outlets compete for clickbait headlines, it's not surprising to find a corresponding hunger for a deeper, more thoughtful form of engagement with ideas and for that - thankfully - there's still no better medium than a book.