カテゴリー: Books
Education ministry orders publisher to rectify illustrations of children deemed inappropriateChina’s education ministry has ordered a state-owned publisher to rectify a school textbook that went viral owing to what social media users described as “trag…
The Indian novelist and her translator scooped the £50,000 prize with Tomb of Sand, a novel about death – but with laughs. The morning after their triumph they talk about fun, feminism and famous ancestors“If you handle a heavy thing with lightness, yo…
Author Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell share the £50,000 prize for ‘extraordinarily funny and fun’ Tomb of SandGeetanjali Shree’s “extremely exuberant and incredibly playful” Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, has won…
Kurangaituku, ‘an epic poem of a novel’, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn prize at a ceremony that delivered ‘loads of surprises’A novel subverting a Māori myth has taken home New Zealand’s most prestigious writing prize at this year’s Ockham New Zealand b…
First copy of the 1631 bible, which mistakenly reads ‘thou shalt commit adultery’, to be found in the southern hemisphereAn extremely rare medieval bible famous for an unfortunate error that encourages adultery has been discovered in New Zealand.The 16…
Door security error meant one of country’s largest city libraries was left open for hours, allowing hundreds to browse shelvesAs New Zealand celebrated a national holiday, one of the country’s largest city libraries was closed, with staff and security …
Māori women are represented in every category and two Māori writers are among the four shortlisted for the fiction prizeFrom an acerbic novel about queer Māori-Russian-Catalan siblings to a self-published portrait of 100 indigenous women, the books in …
Alia Bhatt stars as schmaltz and spectacular fantasy-musical setpieces balance the gruesomeness of this true-crime yarnHere is a luxuriously sleazy-sentimental melodrama about the Mumbai underworld, directed with gusto by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the pow…
Untold Narratives founder Lucy Hannah’s just-published collection showcases the fiction of marginalised writers in AfghanistanWhen Lucy Hannah decided to put together an anthology of short stories by Afghan women in 2019, it already seemed like a hugel…
Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring was born from a desire to preserve online expressions of outrage, grief and dissent, say editorsThe first literary work to emerge from Myanmar since the military seized control of the country a year ago r…
Indian author says pillaging of lands and killing of indigenous people laid foundation for climate emergencyAmitav Ghosh can clearly remember his first interaction with the climate crisis. It was the early 2000s, and Ghosh, now one of India’s most cele…
From a Jacobean traveller’s travails in Sindh to the tangled roots of Nigeria, our pick of new nonfiction books that shine a light on Asia, Africa and South America• Share your top recommendations for books on the developing world in the comments below…
Journalist and historian of China who went from admiring the regime to being one of its sternest criticsJonathan Mirsky, who has died aged 88, was a prominent American historian of China who switched to journalism and won the international reporter of …
Abbas Nazari was one of 433 refugees rescued by the Norwegian cargo ship in 2001 after leaving Indonesia in an unseaworthy boat with his Afghan family. Twenty years on, he recalls the fear and uncertainty on the TampaWe had been aboard the Tampa for a …