Yee wins at VPLAs, Vivendi plans to put Hachette on stock market, moves at Scribe and Ultimo
Grace Yee has won the Victorian Prize for Literature for her poetry collection Chinese Fish (Giramondo) at this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Meanwhile, in France, Vivendi, which acquired Hachette parent company Lagardère last year, has detailed plans to split into four entities, each of which would be listed on the stock market.
In personnel news this week, Ultimo Press announced that Alex Craig has departed the business and Tina Gumnior has joined Scribe as publicity manager.
In Melbourne’s CBD, Hill of Content faces potential relocation or closure, with the building that houses the bookshop going up for sale; in South Australia, Writers SA has announced that it is launching a national literary journal, for which it is recruiting an editor; and, in news from the APA, the organisation has been invited onto the Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group, and has also released a diversity and inclusion plan covering the next two years.
In awards news, Carmel McKenzie has received the 2023 Victorian Premier’s History Award for the book St Kilda 1841–1900: Movers and shakers and money-makers (Manneton Publishing). The longlists for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were announced, as well as the shortlists for the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. And, in Western Australia, the prize for the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award has increased in value, with the addition of a new writing fellowship from the Centre for Stories.
Meanwhile, in the US, Hugo Awards board members have been censured, with two resignations following news that several authors, including Neil Gaiman, R F Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, had work deemed ineligible in last year’s awards; and over 3500 children’s authors, illustrators, agents, editors, and other members of the children’s literature community have signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
And, following on from news last week that Robinsons Bookshop owner Susanne Horman apologised for comments on diverse books posted to her X account, further coverage has appeared on the ABC—where popular culture reporter and author Mawunyo Gbogbo stated that the comments ‘bring into focus the cultural clout of booksellers’—and in the Guardian, where author Alice Pung argued that ‘diversity in kids’ books is not a “woke agenda”, and there certainly isn’t too much of it’.
Category: This week’s news
