SLV staff, board reportedly discussed cancelled Bootcamp writers’ political views; ‘Untapped’ titles move to Ligature; academic authors ‘shocked’ at Microsoft AI agreement
This week, the Age and the Guardian reported that State Library Victoria board members and senior staff discussed the political views of writers who were to host the library’s Teen Writing Bootcamp workshop series before the events were cancelled. Sarah Polkinghorne and Lisa M Given wrote for The Conversation that ‘the State Library Victoria controversy shows what can happen when institutions cling to “neutrality”.’
In other news, some titles previously published under Booktopia’s publishing operation have moved to the digital publishing platform Ligature; senior agent Clare Forster will leave Curtis Brown in August; and HarperCollins has acquired world rights to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s memoir Matters of the Heart.
In awards news, poets Chloe Mayne and Sara Mansour are among the seven recipients of the 2024 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships, each worth $50,000; Griffith Review has announced the five winners of its 2024 Emerging Voices competition; and the PANZ Book Design Award finalists have been revealed.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Bookseller reported that Taylor & Francis has sold access to its authors’ research as part of an AI partnership with Microsoft worth almost £8 million (A$15.6m) in its first year, with authors reporting they had not been informed of the deal; in France, Hachette Livre parent company Vivendi has updated its plans to list parts of its business on the stock market; and, in the US, Scholastic has reported a 7% decrease in revenue for the year ending 31 May.
Category: This week’s news
