Pages & Proofs

Letterpress from Naomie Ross on Vimeo.

Congratulations to author Hilary Mantel. As predicted, her novel Bring up the Bodies has just been announced in London’s Guildhall as the winner of this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize award. This also means that signed copies of Bring Up the Bodies will increase in value very quickly, be quick if you want one. The […]

The first Moomins story from 1945, The Moomins and the Great Flood, is to be published in Britain next month, reports The Guardian. A quest to find lost Moominpappa,  The Moomins and the Great Flood has never been published in the UK before. The Moomins and the Great Flood sees Jansson using a mix of […]

No Lycra in sight. Love this book from 1896. Bicycling for Ladies by Maria E Ward, published by Brentano’s in New York,  with blue pictorial cloth stamped in gray, silver and gold.

Bernard Cornwell, the author of the Sharpe novels and so much more, writes in the Daily Telegraph about his five favourite  historical novels. The Commodore by CS Forester “It was Hornblower who encouraged so many people to read historical novels; and indeed to write them… Jack Aubrey, Richard Sharpe, Bolitho and Ramage all follow in […]

On the day that the EU has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, I recommend Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves as a reminder of what a mess Europe was once in.

Chinese writer Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, reports the BBC. Born Guan Moye, he writes under the pen name of Mo Yan, which translates as “don’t speak” in Chinese. The 57-year-old began writing while working as a soldier in the Chinese army and was first published in 1981. He is […]

Almost a million personal documents belonging to Winston Churchill are now available following the launch of the Churchill Archive Online at the Frankfurt Book Fair.  The digital archive has been assembled by Bloomsbury Academic along with the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, Churchill Heritage and the literary agency Curtis Brown. Letters and documents, including personal […]

Veteran crime writer MC Beaton, 75 years young, is interviewed in The Independent. She has a new Agatha Raisin novel, Hiss and Hers. Beaton sounds especially Raisin-esque when complaining about the nannyish aspects of modern life (smoking bans; rude drivers) or when she reminisces about a murder case from her days as a crime reporter […]

It’s a little worrying that no corporate sponsors came forward to take over the sponsorship of the Orange Prize for Fiction – one of the UK’s major literary awards. Hats off to Cherie Blair, Joanna Trollope, Martha Lane Fox and the other private donors who have come forward to ensure the prize continues. The Guardian […]