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).

A celebration of African literature and languages

In collaboration with SABLE LitMag

Saturday, 31 May 2008, 13.00-20.15
British Museum, London
FREE ADMISSION

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.

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.

The Mills & Boon Centenary Exhibition, And then he kissed her... 100 Years of Mills & Boon, opens on Friday 6th June at Manchester Central Library, St. Peter's Square, Manchester, M2 5PD. The exhibition will run in Manchester until the 31st of July, after which it will set off on a national tour.

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.

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.

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.

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!

In our Meet the Author events, we’ve hosted several big names – Jodi Picoult, Joanna Trollope, Salley Vickers, Alexander McCall Smith, Alice Sebold and Louis de Bernieres to date – but it was always our intention to bring new talent to Winchester. Which is why we invited Stefan Merrill Block to be our guest, his only event outside London.

It would seem Stefan charmed our audience:

Hello Guy

I just wanted to say how enjoyable the talk from Stefan was last night, he was a really engaging character and I am really looking forward to reading his book. Thanks again for organising some really great events. Looking forward to the next one.

Kind regards, Karen Marsh

Hello Guy

What a success last night was - and what a charming lad Stefan is! I think he won over a few hearts with that smile. I missed a trick - when he made that comment about reading groups being better than sex, I should have mentioned we've got a meeting this Thursday.... The other two from our group were too busy swooning to make the connection, as well!

Thanks, Vivienne Jarvis

And his publicist was very complimentary, too:

Dear Guy

I wanted to email you to say THANK YOU for such an amazing evening. It was absolutely perfect, and we all left for London absolutely buzzing - Stefan had a great time, and he said how it out did so many of his American events. It was wonderful to have such support for a debut author, and thank you to you and all the newbooks people and readers for making the event such a success. He also commented on how good the audience questions were (not to mention yours too!)

Thanks again- I’ve come back to Faber declaring that Guy Pringle does the best events, and we all look forward to working together more in the future!

All best wishes, Becky

Read on for 3 of our reviewers’ thoughts on his debut novel The Story of Forgetting, which tackles a thought provoking theme - Alzheimer's - that potentially affects all our lives.

See also Stefan's article on the Guardian website. There is also a Story of Forgetting animation on YouTube.