Category: publishing

The UK’s poet laureate says he wouldn’t wish the job on anyone, and that writing poetry for the royal family gave him a case of writer’s block. “I dried up completely about five years ago and can’t write anything except to commission.”

“As a writer, how can I support this? I should be an absolutist on copyright protection for all books, magazines, and newspapers. But I’m not. The publishers have disgraced themselves, and they are paying the price. Three-hundred-dollar textbooks in the hard sciences are not unusual, and the companies are selling to a captive audience. Hundred-dollar add-ons, masquerading as digital workbooks, or problem-solving sets, are not uncommon.”

“Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz are in the running for the prestigious prize with their maiden novels. Linda Grant is the only woman to make the list, along with former nominee Philip Hensher, Sebastian Barry and Indian writer Amitav Ghosh Murray. The winning writer will be handed the £50,000 prize in London on 14 October.”

“Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year’s Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner’s injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn’t even spend that much time discussing it.”

“Rowling filed a lawsuit against RDR Books, a Michigan-based company, last year over the Harry Potter Lexicon on the grounds that it lifted huge portions of her stories without adding any original thought or interpretation. She called the project ‘wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work’.”

“The past century has taught us that good writing can appear in unexpected forms: film scripts, Sopranos-type series, the storytelling of R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, for instance. And writing about poetry, particularly praising contemporary poetry, is a fine but extremely difficult art.”

Has travel-writing, as a genre, run its course, now that everyone can get everywhere so easily? “No,” says Paul Theroux. “You’re talking about places like the Antarctic, but think about Pakistan. Yes, you can go Uzbekistan, for instance, but imagine the places you can’t go to . . . the Congo, Nigeria . . . You’ll be kidnapped, killed, and people in Manhattan would still say, ‘Those are not interesting places.’

In 40 years of Booker Prizes, how were the winners chosen?

The impenetrable-sounding book, a comprehensive record of Greece’s postal routes, is published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain, which “exists to encourage the collection of Greek stamps and to promote their study”.

“Britain’s biggest exam board has been accused of censorship after it removed a poem containing references to knife crime from the GCSE syllabus. Officials at the AQA board said their request that schools destroy the anthology containing the Carol Ann Duffy poem Education for Leisure had been triggered by concerns in two schools about references to knives.”