Queen’s Birthday Honours, latest funding, awards news and more

A number of authors and publishing industry figures including Marcia Langton, Scott Pape and Karen Williams are among the recipients of this year’s 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Meanwhile, the ASA has called for an extension of the federal government’s JobKeeper program, amid a ‘slow and long’ fallout from Covid-19 for authors and illustrators. Textbook ‘streaming’ service Perlego—first established in the UK in 2016—has launched in Australia and New Zealand.

United Publishers of Armidale—a collaboration between children’s book publishers Christmas Press and Little Pink Dog Books—is the latest recipient of an Australia Council Resilience Fund grant, while a number of literary organisations and writers have received Create NSW funding.

The shortlists for the Booksellers’ Choice 2020 Book of the Year Awards have been announced, as have shortlists for the REAL Awards, the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award and NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

In the US, three of the Big Five publishers have pledged to increase diversity in their workplace and the books they publish, following a day of collective action taken by publishing staff to protest systemic racism in the industry. Meanwhile, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Bloomsbury became the latest publishers to skip Frankfurt’s physical event.

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Category: This week’s news