Australian publishers wait and see on Frankfurt, latest awards and more

The Frankfurt Book Fair is going ahead as scheduled from 14–18 October; however, whether Australian publishers attend the fair or not will depend if overseas travel restrictions are lifted in time for the event. Meanwhile, major international publishers including HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan UK have announced they’ll skip Frankfurt’s physical event.

This year’s National Simultaneous Storytime attracted a record number of participants, as libraries across the country begin to reopen.

Local writer Andrea A Macleod has won the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize in the Pacific category, and Yves Rees has won the ABR’s Calibre Essay Prize. The longlists for this year’s Davitt Awards have been announced, as has the shortlist for the Peter Carey Short Story Award.

Meanwhile, the Copyright Agency has announced an additional $125,000 in emergency funding, and the Australian War Memorial has established a new literary prize in honour of Les Carlyon. Overseas, Sydney chef Josh Niland’s The Whole Fish Cookbook was named the 2020 James Beard Book of the Year, and Brisbane-based writer Jacob P Avila was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for Best Unpublished Manuscript.

In international news, the UK book trade has shown support for the Black Lives Matter movement, while in the US, publishers are suing the Internet Archive for copyright infringement and Jonathan Karp has been appointed CEO of Simon & Schuster, succeeding Carolyn Reidy, who died from a heart attack last month. Meanwhile, British writer and broadcast journalist Johny Pitts was named winner of the Jhalak Prize for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writers.

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Category: This week’s news