Labour MP's book beats Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher biography just days after taking home £10,000 Ondaatje award Alan Johnson's memoir of his poverty-stricken childhood has beaten Charles Moore's account of the early life of Margaret Thatcher to win the former home secretary Britain's top award for political writing, the Orwell prize . The Labour MP's much-praised This Boy was named winner of...
Foreign correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad praised for work on Syria while Jonathan Freedland awarded special prize for 'lucidity and elegance' of his writing Two Guardian journalists, Jonathan Freedland and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, have won the Orwell prize for their political journalism. Freedland, the Guardian's executive editor, Opinion, was awarded the special prize for journalism for his writing, including...
Gwyneth Jones on a debut dystopia set in a beehive, where one bee rebels against the totalitarian state Flora 717 is a bee with problems, right from the start. Her sisters in this batch of lowly sanitation workers emerge modestly: Flora smashes her way out of the pupating cell, in a storm of waxy shrapnel. She's too big, she's too dark, she's grotesquely ugly. But she's strong, a quick learner and...
Why is it satisfying to solve a puzzle but amusing to get a joke? Trying to explain a joke has long been considered a paradigm of pedantic futility. That hasn't stopped thinkers through the ages erecting vast and subtle theories of comedy. But none of them had brain-scanners. Perhaps cognitive neuroscientist Scott Weems can explain once and for all why Louis CK is funny and David Cameron isn't....
Britain has gone wrong: greed and inequality are rampant. How do we create a society in which money isn't worshipped so fawningly and people have more regard for one another? "Don't be evil": 16 years ago, that was the founding slogan of Google, which only goes to show that 16 years can be a very long time in business. Having started out determined to be different from every other soulless...
Mike Carey, novelist, star of the comics world and one of the writers behind X-Men and the Fantastic Four, will be online on Friday, May 23, at 1pm. Post your questions now Comics star, horror novelist and screenwriter Mike Carey will be on hand to answer questions on Friday. Carey recently reinvented the zombie genre for a literary readership with his novel The Girl With All The Gifts described in...
Harper Lee puts request to district judge, saying Alabama museum has set additional terms to settlement Harper Lee's settlement with the local museum that the To Kill a Mockingbird author had accused of exploiting her fame, has fallen through, according to local reports. Lee brought a lawsuit last year against the Monroeville, Alabama museum over its sale of souvenirs and memorabilia featuring her...
It got a thumbs down from reviewers, but the Wodehouse comic fiction prize was right to recognise this delicious jeu d'esprit Edward St Aubyn's satirical novel Lost for Words , which depicts the fools and frauds who judge a prestigious literary prize and the charlatans who compete for it, has just won a prestigious literary prize . This year's Wodehouse prize for comic fiction has gone to a novel that...
From Knut Hamsun's classic story of starvation to Karl Ove Knausgård's autobiographical opus, here is the novelist's pick of Norwegian books in translation Norway is many things to many people who have never set foot on its shores. It is the Land of the Midnight Sun, of 1,000 fjords, where the northern lights dance across endless skies. It is also the home of Harry Hole and Hanne Wilhelmsen, where...
Californian home of Fahrenheit 451 author boasts 'soaring vaulted ceilings, classic brick fireplace and cultural provenance' The California home where the late Ray Bradbury dreamed up hundreds of much-loved fantastical short stories has been put up for sale for an asking price of $1,495,000 (£885,450). The house at 10265 Cheviot Drive in Culver City was Bradbury's home for more than half a century....
The late Peter Matthiessen's final book is a fictionalised account of a retreat to a former concentration camp in Poland, and a skilful look at the defining tragic enigma of the 21st century Peter Matthiessen, who died at the age of 86 on 5 April , was an adventurous and contradictory man. His 11 novels and 22 works of non-fiction explored the many worlds we live in to a greater degree than perhaps...
The writer is best known for his semi-autobiographical novels about an Englishman from a posh but monstrous family. St. Aubyn's new book marks a departure....
Do you like writing about things that happened in history? Author Holly Webb loves it which is why she has set her Maisie Hitchins books in Victorian times! Here Holly shares her favourite children's books set in the past plus some brilliant tips on how to make your historical stories even more believable. Read an interview with Holly Webb by The Book Munchers I love writing books set in the past mostly...
Booker prize-winner, whose crime novels written under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black were adapted for BBC TV series Quirke, says that a murdered human is a 'tragic thing' The Booker prize-winning author John Banville, who has killed off at least his fair share of fictional creations when writing under his crime novelist pseudonym of Benjamin Black, has hit out at violent crime dramas on television,...
A Dane who wrote almost exclusively in English, Isak Dinesen used lurid subjects, including incest, murder and witchcraft, to explore philosophy, morality and questions of identity My paperback copy of the 1957 collection Last Tales bears a portrait of Isak Dinesen wearing a hooded cape. She might be Dorothea Viehmann , the storyteller who provided the Grimms with a valuable cache of fairy tales, or...
Renee Montagne talks to chef and author Dan Barber about new book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. ...
Geoff Dyer's entertainingly cranky new book chronicles the two weeks he spent as a writer-in-residence aboard the USS George H.W. Bush , amid the buzzing activity of an aircraft carrier on the job....
Also: Freegan, crowdfunding are added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary; Joshua Ferris talks to The Paris Review about the difficulty of naming characters....
The first book in a trilogy, God's Dog is a gripping thriller with fearsome Swiss Guards, sinister priests and a detective monk The author's name may be familiar to you: Marani wrote New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs , both of which especially the former proved surprise successes in the UK. Those novels concerned themselves, in strange and exciting ways, with the oddness and...
It's that time of year traditionally reserved for tying the knot. So what are your favourite wedding scenes or outfits in fiction? We're coming into wedding season: the Whitsun weddings in the Philip Larkin poem would be taking place on Saturday 7 June this year (Easter was late, so Whit is late too), and there's a display of wedding dresses now on at the V&A . Time for a look at weddings and those...