BWF changes venue, dates, bookseller; Bloomsbury adds audiobooks to Spotify; Flanagan declines Baillie Gifford prize money
The Brisbane Writers Festival has announced it will next year be held at the Brisbane Powerhouse and take place during October, with Avid Reader and Riverbend Books replacing the Library Shop at SLQ as festival booksellers; Bloomsbury had announced its catalogue of audiobook titles will be available through Spotify; and Richard Flanagan, who was last week announced as the winner of the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for his book Question 7 (Knopf), has declined to accept the £50,000 (A$97,227) cash prize associated with the award, citing the sponsor’s investment in fossil fuels.
In other news this week, a new report into skills shortages in the creative industries has identified an acute shortage of skilled workers in editorial, production, and management roles in the publishing industry; Lonely Planet co-founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler have pledged to match all donations to the Wheeler Centre for the next three years, up to $1 million; and three writers have received grants in the 2024 round of Arts Tasmania’s individuals and groups funding program.
In bookseller news, local booksellers in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania are planning to take part in the Global Book Crawl, planned for the last week of April 2025; Dymocks returns to Penrith with a new franchise store in Westfield Penrith; and the Dymocks chain has announced Kaliane Bradley’s novel, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), as the 2024 Dymocks Book of the Year.
In other awards news, Chris Masters has won the 2024 Australian Political Book of the Year Award for the book Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes (A&U); the winners of the 2024 Australian Business Book Awards and the Sisters in Crime Australia 2024 Scarlet Stiletto Awards have been announced; and the New England Writers’ Centre has announced the winners of this year’s New England Illustration Prize for Children’s Picture Book Publishing.
Overseas, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo) has been longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize.
In other international news, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance will start selling print books in bookshops from early 2025 under its publishing imprint; the winners of the 2024 National Book Awards have been announced; and Anne Michaels has won the Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award, for her novel Held (Bloomsbury).
In rights and adaptations news this week, Hardie Grant Books has acquired world print, ebook and audiobook rights to the authorised biography Ian Baker-Finch: To Hell and Back by Geoff Saunders; Simon & Schuster imprint Summit Books has acquired ANZ rights to the debut short fiction collection Wait Here by Lucy Nelson, via Martin Shaw Literary; Affirm Press has acquired world rights picture book series Handbooks for Little Humans by Zanni Louise, in a three-house auction; and a screen adaptation of Sally Hepworth’s novel The Family Next Door (Macmillan) will be produced as a television series for ABC TV.
Category: This week’s news
