The Beatles Story is proud to announce its first literary festival which will run throughout May 2008. Four of the world’s foremost Beatles authors will appear in special series of free, public events which will focus both on their individual writing careers and broader Beatles-related subjects. This programme of events will be complemented by a number of children’s workshops and a special Beatles memorabilia valuation day.

The full programme of events is as follows:

Wednesday 14th May – 7.30PM - Booking essential!

A Man Booker Prize nominee, an award-winning poet, and a best-selling American author are among the writers shortlisted for Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are the only major British book awards judged by scholars and students of Literature and are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh for the best work of fiction and the best biography published during the previous year.

The Desmond Elliott Prize is a new biennial prize for a first novel written in English and published in the UK. Worth £10,000 to the winner, the prize is named after the literary agent and publisher, Desmond Elliott, who died in 2003.
Chair of the judges, Penny Vincenzi, will announce the winner at a party held at Fortnum & Mason on 26th June 2008.

19.15pm, London, 4 June 2008 - British author Rose Tremain has won the thirteenth Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction with her tenth novel The Road Home (Chatto & Windus).

London, 14 August 2008: For the third year in a row, Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, (Bloomsbury) has been voted as the Reading Group Book of the Year. Hosseini's popularity with reading groups continues as his second novel, One Thousand Splendid Suns, came in second.

Votes were collected via the Penguin and Orange websites and from reading groups entering the 2008 Penguin/Orange Broadband Readers' Group Prize.

The top 10 favourite reading group books are:
 

Waterstone's and Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival today announced the longlist for the fourth Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Now a firm date in the literary awards calendar, the longlist once again covers an exceptional mix of new and also more established writers covering styles from across the crime genre.

Translated fiction has enjoyed a huge boom in recent years, with the successes of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (trans. Lucia Graves) and Irène Némirovsky’s astonishing Suite Française (trans. Sandra Smith) which have both sold over a million copies worldwide.

Celebrating Sanctuary, the annual festival which celebrates the work of refugee artists in London and the UK, is pleased to announce that Book Slam will be bringing a vibrant literary strand, produced especially for the 2008 National Year of Reading, to this year's festival to be held on Sunday, 15 June 2008, 2 - 7pm, at Bernie Spain Gardens, Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 (adjacent to Oxo Tower Wharf; nearest train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo). Admission is free.

Announced at the opening night of the Theakstons Old Peculier CrimeWriting Festival, Stef Penney's debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves beat off stiff competition from established authors such as Alexander McCall Smith and Simon Kernick to win the coveted prize.