The announcement of the winner of the Man Booker International Prize this week highlights again the growing importance of literary prizes in the international book world. Read more
It's a measure of the growing interest in short stories, amongst both writers and readers, that Costa launched its short story prize in 2012 and that the public is currently invited to read and listen to the shortlisted stories selected from over 1,000 entries on the Costa Book Awards website, and to take part in the public vote. Read more
This year's Booker result raises so many interesting issues that a longer report on Frankfurt, the Book Fair and other issues relating to international publishing will come next week. The links this week give a clue to the many themes that Paul Beatty's win with The Sellout has raised. Read more
Sometimes an author seems to step new-minted into bestsellerdom and, even rarer, literary acclaim. Lisa McInerney is such a writer and her winning of the Bailey Prize earlier in the month, followed by the Desmond Elliott Prize this week, marks a remarkable debut. Read more
Nick Clee asks in this week's Bookbrunch if you need to transcend a prize to win it, inspired by the Costa win by Frances Hardinge's children's book. Read more
This week's story was to have been on the rise in support for short stories, until, that is, Marlon James had his stunning Man Booker Prize win last night. Read more
The longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize is both diverse and international, with a wide range of different kinds of writers and a number of debuts. The longlist features three British writers, five US writers and one each from the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, India, Nigeria and Jamaica. Read more
When John Spurling won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction recently with The Ten Thousand Things it was much more than a good win against a formidable shortlist, which included Martin Amis, Helen Dunmore, Adam Foulds and Kamila Shamsie. Read more
The growth of literary prizes of one kind and another seems unending, although it's a pity from the point of view of unpublished writers that so many of them are restricted to books which have come from traditional publishers. Read more
Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is having an extraordinary impact. Now that it's won the new Bailey Women's Prize (successor to last year's Women's Fiction Prize and the Orange Prize), there seems to be no stopping the author. Read more
Submission guidelines: BIO (By Invitation Only). Authors can get in touch via email with a synopsis of between 500 - 1,000 words. Authors should then only send in manuscripts if invited to do so. Hard copy manuscripts sent in without invitation will not be read. Read more
'Over the past 20 years, some of the best novels written, as it were, or writing that serves the function of a novel, have been on Netflix and HBO. The writing is complicated, the plotting is complicated. It has subtext, and people are really responding to it in a way that, unfortunately, is not happening with books...
I have a small confession to make: I've never been told I need to cut words from my manuscripts. In fact, I'm the author envious of anyone who needs to do so because I'm the one struggling to get my manuscript up to my target word count. And for a long time, I feared I was the only writer with this issue. Read more
Alice Hoffman, author of numerous adult and young adult books including Practical Magic and Aquamarine, has a new middle grade book, When We Flew Away, a historically based imagining of Anne Frank's life before the family was forced into hiding. Young Anne is grappling with her developing identity within her family and community, at times blissfully happy and others deeply contemplative. Read more
In 2007, after my manuscript had been rejected for the 44th time, a colleague offered to introduce me to a published novelist. It turned out to be Mantel - and I was fortunate enough to soak up her wisdom for the next 15 years
My debut psychological suspense novel, The Bookseller, sold to Harper in 2013 in a pre-empt. I'm not going to lie-it was an amazing deal. The type of deal that compelled me to ask my husband, when I called to break the news, "Are you sitting down?"
'Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.