PRH and Amanda Gorman Launch Creative Writing Award for Poetry
publishersweekly.com – Saturday August 14, 2021
Penguin Random House has announced its partnership with Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, to launch the Amanda Gorman Award for Poetry, a new creative writing award focused on poetry for public high school students. With a first-place prize of $10,000, the award will recognize a student for an original literary composition in English for poetry. Submissions for the award open on October 1, 2021, and close on February 1, 2022.
How Have Publishers Survived the Pandemic? ‘It’s Kind of a Miracle’
thetyee.ca – Tuesday August 10, 2021
When the pandemic arrived, it hit the book business hard, closing stores, tying up titles in backed-up warehouses and threatening the survival of publishers — including British Columbia’s vibrant sector of smaller presses.
A year and half later, the virus that altered every corner of the economy has spurred changes for publishing. One effect: More of us are reading and in different ways. Another: More of us are writing books, which has produced a surge in self-publishing.
Abbott, Peace and Cha headline Noirwich Crime Writing Festival
thebookseller.com – Saturday July 31, 2021
Megan Abbott will deliver this year's Noirwich Crime Writing Festival Lecture, focusing on adaptation and crime writing in the era of Netflix and HBO.
The festival is now in its eighth year and will run from 9th–12th September, delivered by the National Centre for Writing and the University of East Anglia (UEA). This year's festival will be a hybrid programme with in-person creative writing workshops at Dragon Hall, as well as free online events to extend the reach to international audiences.
Joining Abbott in topping the bill are David Peace and Korean-American novelist Steph Cha, who won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for her crime fiction novel Your House Will Pay (Faber). The programme will also include a showcase of new voices in crime writing from UEA’s MA programme and a celebration of over 50 years of creative writing at the university. Further programme announcements will be made in the coming weeks.
Conservative children’s publisher Brave Books debuts with ‘Elephants Are Not Birds’
nypost.com – Sunday July 25, 2021
A new conservative publishing house wants to get the “wokeness” out of bedtime.
Launching this week, Brave Books will focus exclusively on stories for kids, and offers parents “a conservative alternative to the current cultural activism that our children are being taught in schools, in the entertainment they watch and the books they read,” according to their website.
Company CEO Trent Talbot, who had his first child a little more than a year ago, conceived of Brave Books when, he said, he started to notice “that there is a real war going on for the hearts and minds of our kids. And everywhere I looked was propaganda,” the Montgomery, Texas-based dad told The Post.
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