Scandinavian crime fiction might be all the rage in the book charts but French writer Fred Vargas has seen off competition from a cluster of Nordic authors to take the Crime Writers' Association's International Dagger award.

Writers have, increasingly, been getting booked for music festivals as part of the literary line-up at Latitude, Green Man, the Big Chill, and most recently, Glastonbury, which introduced its first lecture series last month, at which writers including Tom Hodgkinson

ITN and publishers including Penguin, Faber & Faber and Random House have teamed up to create an online book club that uses a YouTube channel and launches today with a video feature on Michael Jackson.

New children's laureate Anthony Browne has attempted to calm the storm that has blown up among children's authors over a new scheme requiring them to be vetted before visiting schools.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

The names of twelve European authors to receive the first ever European Union Prize for Literature have been announced by the European Commission. The prizes will be presented during an Award ceremony in Brussels on 28 September. In recognition of

BBC Worldwide, the BBC's commercial arm, saw yearly revenue hit £1bn for the first time, but profit before tax fell because of two exceptional items.

Courier Corporation (Nasdaq: CRRC), one of America's leading book manufacturers and specialty publishers, today announced results for the quarter ended June 27, 2009, the third quarter of its 2009 fiscal year. With the nationwide recession continuing to dampen sales in

A new literary prize in honour of the late Harold Pinter is being launched by English PEN and will look, in Pinter's own words, to reward a writer who casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world, and who shows

Kenichiro Isozaki has won the 141st Akutagawa Prize for his novel "Tsui-no Sumika" (The Last Home), while Kaoru Kitamura has taken the Naoki Prize for his work "Sagi to Yuki" (Heron and Snow).

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for and thought they owned.