SIR Michael Morpurgo, former Children’s Laureate and author of acclaimed children’s novel ‘War Horse’, will be returning among a number of top authors speaking at the fifth Dulverton Exmoor Literary Festival later this year.

The festival, from Friday to Monday, November 13 to 16, will also feature an interview with Sir Michael’s wife Clare, daughter of the founder of Penguin Books and who runs the charity Farms for City Children.

Other guest speakers include Emily Howes, the award-winning author of ‘The Painter’s Daughters’.

Line-up of top authors taking shape for Dulverton and Exmoor Literary Festival, wsfp.co.uk

A new children’s book series, set against the backdrop of Wolverhampton’s Chapel Ash area, has been launched by a local author.

Satnam Rakhra’s The Kids from Chapel Ash is a series of 11 books about growing up in Wolverhampton.

Rakhra said he rarely saw himself reflected in the books he read as a child in school.

“The characters rarely looked like me, lived where I lived, or came from families like mine,” he said, “I wanted today’s children to have something different.”

‘Seeing your own community in a story matters’, BBC

Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko and Zadie Smith are among the more than 40 writers to have withdrawn from Adelaide Writers Week in the last 24 hours.

Some 90 participants, including key national and international guests such as Helen Garner, Toni Jordan, Trent Dalton, Melissa Lucashenko and Zadie Smith, have withdrawn in protest from Adelaide Writers Week, a core program of the 2026 Adelaide Festival, after the Festival Board’s decision yesterday [8 January] to remove award-winning Palestinian-Australian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the Writers Week program.

Adelaide Writers Week in disarray as almost 100 writers boycott over Board’s ‘censorship’ of Randa Abdel-Fattah, artshub.com.au

Sophie Kinsella, author of the bestselling Shopaholic series of novels, has been remembered as a “wonderful, warm woman” following her death at the age of 55.

Author Sophie Kinsella remembered as a ‘wonderful, warm woman’, BBC News

I saw this from November 2024.

Subtitle: A conversation with the author of ‘White City’

I don’t even remember how I came across Vine Street, British author Dominic Nolan’s third crime novel, because it is published in the UK and not readily available in the U.S., but by the time I finished the first chapter, I was hooked. This was a major talent with an original voice. The story, which jumps between the 1930s, the 1960s, and the early Aughts–spending most of the time in the ‘30s in London’s seedy Soho neighborhood between the wars—follows Leon Geats, a vice cop who likes the criminals he’s supposed to police far more than he does most of the coppers he works with.

Despite the gruesome murders—based on the real-life murders of foreign sex workers during the period—Geats’ passion wears off on the reader and you find yourself wanting to inhabit this shady world and the big and burly and broken hearts that love it. And without giving anything away, I’ll say that the twist at the end is perhaps the best sleight of hand I’ve read in any book. Just masterful plotting.

So when I saw that Nolan had a new historically-based crime novel coming out in England in November, I couldn’t wait to read it and I got in touch with Nolan to arrange for a copy. It was again peopled with deeply conflicted, powerfully drawn, tough and tragic characters racing around real historical events and bumping into real people. Think of a British James Ellroy without the ego or the noxious right-wing delight in racist epithets.

Dominic Nolan on Historical Crime Fiction, London, and Cycles of Violence