The Guyana-born, British-based writer takes home the Royal Society of Literature prize honouring women writers over 60 who have broken barriers

The poet Grace Nichols has been named the winner of the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize, a £10,000 award that recognises women writers over 60 who broke through at a time when the literary world was less open to them.

Nichols, 76, who was born in Guyana and moved to the UK in 1977, made her name with I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which took the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1983, and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, a collection published the following year. Her poems have been GCSE set texts for decades, and she has written extensively for children as well as adults.

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© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

CDU und CSU machen »migrantische Gruppen« für die Krawalle vom Wochenende verantwortlich. Eine Spurensuche zeigt, dass die Realität komplizierter ist.

Howe’s ‘exceptional’ Foretokens took the main £10,000 award, while Nur Turkmani, Tara Bergin and Biff Smith swept up the remaining categories

Sarah Howe has won the Forward prize for best collection, one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards, for Foretokens, a collection that explores new parenthood, the death of her father and her mother’s early life in Hong Kong.

Howe was announced as the winner during a ceremony hosted by Joelle Taylor at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday evening, and will receive £10,000.

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© Photograph: Marc Lixenberg

© Photograph: Marc Lixenberg

© Photograph: Marc Lixenberg

Move over Oasis – 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets to a masquerade ball to celebrate the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, while specialist bookshops catering for the genre report huge sales

When The Spicy Librarian, a romance bookshop in Leamington Spa, announced a masquerade ball to celebrate the new Sarah J Maas novel, 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets. “We sold out within 13 minutes,” says the shop’s co-founder Ali Maynard James. “As soon as tickets went on sale, our website crashed”.

The shop was one of many across the UK marking the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, the first instalment of Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series in more than five years. On Monday night, bookshops threw parties and opened past midnight – and The Spicy Librarian hired a stately home to mark the occasion.

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© Photograph: Beth Melvin

© Photograph: Beth Melvin

© Photograph: Beth Melvin

Die AfD-Leaks enthüllen, wie sich bekannte Meinungsforscher, Juristen und Journalisten schon früh der Partei andienten – und welche Rechtsextremisten Aufträge bekamen.

Shortlisted for the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes respectively, the novelist and biographer talk about working and living together – and giving a voice to Black queer history

The literary power couple is a historically seductive concept. Two writers sharing a life, their private and creative worlds entwined, each becoming witness to and critic of the other’s work. Think Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Or, less auspiciously, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Now, into this illustrious company steps a new pair: the novelist Marlon James and the biographer Nicholas Boggs, whose books have each been shortlisted for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards – James for the Booker prize and Boggs for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. Between them, they have produced two formidable books, each the culmination of years of work, and each concerned with the lives of Black queer men whose stories have often been overlooked.

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© Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

© Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

© Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

Das AfD-Leak enthält nach Recherchen der ZEIT auch Namen und Adressen von mehr als 23.000 Erstwählern, darunter Jugendliche. Wie sind sie dort gelandet?

The Yorkshire-born author says that the 1,000 word competition is for people ‘just living their lives being quietly hilarious’

Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding has launched a comedy writing prize in the name of her most famous creation, aimed at unearthing funny new voices from the north of England.

The Bridget Jones prize for northern comedy writing will go to the funniest self-contained, first-person prose of 1,000 words. The format echoes the anonymous diary columns in the Independent that first brought Bridget to readers in the mid-1990s.

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© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

Booksellers have reported selling out of the Irish novelist’s works after it was announced that her books would be withdrawn from sale in the UK

Booksellers have reported selling out of copies of Sally Rooney’s novels, following the news that her books would be withdrawn from sale in the UK, given her support for the banned group Palestine Action. Sales shot up nearly 300% in a week, as a host of high profile writers signed letters in support of the Irish author, including Zadie Smith, Annie Ernaux, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith and Kamila Shamsie.

Bookmarked, an independent bookshop in Bristol, had three Sally Rooney novels in stock when Faber announced last week that it would stop supplying the author’s books. Within hours, customers had bought all of them. Now the shop has none, and it cannot get any more. “In retrospect, I feel like we should have put them behind a glass casing, forever on display until the law is overturned,” says the shop’s general manager Evelyn.

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© Photograph: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu/Getty Images

Fast 300 Gigabyte an Daten legen brisante Interna aus zwölf Jahren AfD offen. In den Mails und Dokumenten finden sich persönliche Details von Spendern und Mitgliedern.

Die schlechte Nachricht zuerst: Autofahrer werden für ihre Kfz-Versicherungen 2027 mehr zahlen müssen. Und nun die gute: Die Zuschläge fallen weniger stark aus als im Vorjahr. Dafür gibt es Gründe.

Chilean-American author awarded Premio Planeta for sequel to her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits

The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1m (£843,000) Premio Planeta, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym, with a sequel to her celebrated debut novel, The House of the Spirits.

Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the award on Thursday with La hora antes del alba, which returns to the characters of her 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga set against political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile.

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© Photograph: Pau de la Calle/GTRES/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Pau de la Calle/GTRES/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Pau de la Calle/GTRES/Shutterstock

The Booker-wining author of Possession was known for her voracious research. Now, 68 boxes of her notebooks, letters and diaries acquired by the British Library reveal how she assembled the raw material of her fiction

At 20, Antonia Susan Byatt was not yet sure she could write. “Do I take myself seriously as a writer?” she asked herself in her diary in September 1956. “No, I think not.”

The young Byatt – who would go on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, best known for her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance – was troubled by the possibility that her mind might not be equal to her ambitions. Yet her determination was already evident. On her 20th birthday, she wrote: “Today, I know I can do anything. But not yet.”

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© Photograph: Ian Cook/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ian Cook/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ian Cook/Getty Images

Der Papst hat Lungenkrebs. Pneumologe Torsten Bauer erklärt, worauf es bei der Behandlung ankommt und wie die Lunge mit einem Lappen weniger atmet.

Most prestigious literature prize goes to Canadian known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red

• ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson

• Where to start with: Anne Carson

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The academy cited the author’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

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© Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/Reuters

© Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/Reuters

© Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/Reuters

Benjamin Davis appealing against dismissal from FAO, after being accused by director general of playing ‘political games’

A former senior UN food agency official has alleged he was fired last week for his work highlighting hunger in Gaza, and has launched an appeal against his dismissal.

Benjamin Davis said the leadership of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had refused to renew his contract as director of its rural transformation and gender equality division because his team had published a brief on hunger in Gaza and held a seminar on the subject last year, and because he had taken part in weekly “moment of silence” vigils on FAO grounds for those killed.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Ermittler haben den früheren BND-Präsidenten August Hanning festgenommen. Er soll sich Staatsgeheimnisse beschafft und das Wissen zu Geld gemacht haben.

10 poets are in the running for the prestigious £25,000 prize, with collections that ‘remind us why it’s to poetry we turn to reorient ourselves’

The former poet laureate Andrew Motion and Pulitzer prize winner Jorie Graham are among the 10 poets shortlisted for this year’s £25,000 TS Eliot prize, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious award for a single volume of poetry.

Motion has been selected for Gravity Archives, while Graham, who was previously shortlisted in 2012, is on the list for Killing Spree.

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© Photograph: JQB57/Aisha Butler Photography

© Photograph: JQB57/Aisha Butler Photography

© Photograph: JQB57/Aisha Butler Photography

Only 150 of 2,189 titles published in UK for young children last year focused on minority ethnic, disabled or neurodivergent characters

The number of children’s books featuring Black main characters fell by almost 8% last year, according to research into diversity in UK publishing.

Just 47 – or 2.1% – of the 2,189 books published for under-10s in 2025 featured a Black main character, a 7.8% fall from the previous year, according to Inclusive Books for Children. Black children make up about 8.5% of that age bracket in England and Wales.

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© Photograph: MBI/Alamy

© Photograph: MBI/Alamy

© Photograph: MBI/Alamy

The acclaimed American journalist, who won the nonfiction prize in 2021, is shortlisted alongside Andrea Wulf and Matthew Sweet

Former Baillie Gifford winner Patrick Radden Keefe is among the authors shortlisted for the 2026 prize, this time with his book on London’s criminal underbelly.

The six-strong shortlist spans literary biography, ancient history, true crime and international reportage, with James Baldwin, Barbara Cartland and Alexander the Great among its subjects.

To explore the shortlisted titles for the Baillie Gifford prize 2026, visit guardianbookshop.com.

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© Photograph: Baillie Gifford Prize (c) Preference Studios

© Photograph: Baillie Gifford Prize (c) Preference Studios

© Photograph: Baillie Gifford Prize (c) Preference Studios