Prolific audiobook narrator Lindsay Dorcus is among a group of six Illinois voice actors, podcasters, and journalists bringing class action lawsuits against tech companies that trained AI models on their “voice footprints,” Publishers Lunch reports. Nine separate lawsuits brought against Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ElevenLabs, Adobe, and Samsung allege that the vocal talents’ works were “scraped” from internet sources for training purposes without the narrators’ consent, a violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). “The Amazon suit is particularly pointed on the topic of audiobook narration, claiming that Amazon’s ignoring BIPA was ‘a deliberate institutional decision.’”

“Archaeologists working in Egypt have discovered a remarkable combination of Homeric epic and Egyptian ritual: a 2,000-year-old mummy with a papyrus fragment of the Iliad sealed in a clay packet outside its wrappings,” the New York Times reports. The papyrus fragment was unearthed at a burial site known as Oxyrhynchus, where it accompanied the mummy of a non-royal male, bundled close to the body. Scholars speculate that the passage served as more than good reading on the long path to eternity: “For a Roman-era Egyptian, the Iliad—specifically some lines from Book 2’s ‘Catalogue of Ships’—was perhaps as crucial for navigating the afterlife as a magical spell.” 

Final approval of a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors whose works were used to train its AI model Claude stalled yesterday as the judge in the case asked for more details about “issues including lawyers’ fees and payments to lead ​plaintiffs in what is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement,” Reuters reports. The settlement had received initial approval from Judge William Alsup, now retired, in September 2025, making it the first major U.S. case settled concerning authors’ rights in the training of AI. “Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92 percent of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, an attorney for the authors said during the hearing. The settlement has ​spurred objections from authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates ​the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or wrongly excludes some copyright owners.”

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut collection, Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025). She received £20,000 (approximately $26,794). The other poet shortlisted for this year’s prize were Harriet Armstrong for To Rest Our Minds and Bodies (Les Fugitives), Colwill Brown for We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Vintage), Suzannah V. Evans for Under the Blue (Bloomsbury), Seán Hewitt for Open, Heaven (Vintage), and Derek Owusu for Borderline Fiction (Canongate). The judges were Irenosen Okojie, Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly, and Eley Williams. The annual award celebrates “exceptional literary talent” under the age of forty. 

The New York Public Library and Random House Publishing Group are partnering to offer the Kate Medina Fellowship for Literary Narrative Nonfiction to support writers whose projects “engage meaningfully” with the library’s onsite collections, including manuscripts, archives, books, photographs, prints, maps, newspapers, and journals. The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $30,000 to support four months of research between September 1, 2026, and March 15, 2027. Applications are due June 15.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 10, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” The top five titles are: 1. The Calamity Club (Spiegel & Grau) by Kathryn Stockett, 2. John of John (Grove Press) by Douglas Stuart, 3. Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, 4. I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit Books) by Jacqueline Harpman, and 5. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland.

Lee Lai has won Australia’s Stella Prize, becoming the first nonbinary writer and first graphic novelist to take home the prestigious award, the Guardian reports. Lai receives the $60,000 honor for her book Cannon, published by Canadian press Drawn + Quarterly. The book follows a queer Chinese woman living in Montreal who cares for an aging relative by day and works at an upscale restaurant by night. The Stella Prize is offered by the nonprofit Stella, which describes itself as “the major voice for gender equity and cultural change in Australian literature;” the prize was opened to nonbinary writers in 2021.

Hachette Book Group leadership has launched a campaign to dissuade its employees from seeking to unionize, Publishers Lunch reports. With headings including “Why We Believe Hachette Is Stronger Without a Union” and “What You Could Lose With Union Negotiation,” a series of electronic messages and flyers posted around the Hachette offices present the company’s talking points. Hachette Workers Coalition responded online, arguing that the corporate messages “[frame] the union as a third party that will harm our existing benefits and workplace culture. ...But the union is all of us, and we won’t be intimidated.”

Texas Book Festival has announced its launch of Burro Libro Press, a new imprint that will focus on “discovering and publishing debut literary fiction by emerging writers with strong ties to Texas.” Developed in collaboration with the Austin-based indie press Deep Vellum Publishing, Burro Libro will find authors through an annual first book contest in which winners will receive publication, $5,000, a professionally-produced audiobook, and promotion at the Texas Book Festival. Submission for the inaugural contest will be open from June 1 to June 30. “We are excited to partner with Texas Book Festival on a program that creates new opportunities for debut fiction writers connected to Texas,” said Jill Meyers, editorial director of Deep Vellum, in a press release. “Deep Vellum has always believed in championing ambitious literary voices, and this collaboration allows us to support emerging authors in a meaningful and lasting way while deepening our partnership with Texas Book Festival.”

Writer Beware provides examples of the latest scams targeting writers, including an e-mail invitation to be a featured guest at a book festival or conference event and an offer to be interviewed on a radio show or podcast. “Unfortunately, AI-driven impersonation scams have glommed onto these events in a big way,” writes Victoria Strauss. “I’m getting a growing number of reports from writers who’ve received credible-seeming invitations that have turned out to be completely fake. It’s yet another area where writers must be extremely careful not to take anything at face value.” Among the details to look out for: “a Gmail, or occasionally an AOL, e-mail address where you’d normally expect the contact to come from a company or event email domain.”

Less than three weeks away from Pride Month, Kelly Jensen of Book Riot has released her annual guide to Pride displays in libraries. Intended primarily “to help library workers consider where and how to showcase LGBTQ+ books, programs, and other materials throughout June,” this year’s overview provides information about what to do if you see instances of censorship and how to write to your local library board about offering LGBTQ+ books and LGBTQ+ programming. “For libraries, Pride has traditionally been a month for joyful displays of queer books, with periodic and predictable complaints,” Jensen writes. “But several years into surging book bans, escalating violence, and swift-rising fascism, it is important to prepare for the upcoming month of events to anticipate all that has, does, and might arise.”

The winners of the 2026 British Book Awards (the Nibbies, as they’re commonly known) were announced at a ceremony in London on Monday, the Bookseller reports. Among the winners are the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (Doubleday) won Overall Book of the Year as well as Book of the Year in the narrative nonfiction category; Florence Knapp, whose book The Names (Phoenix) won the award in the debut fiction category; and Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose audiobook Cursed Daughters (WF Howes), narrated by Weruche Opia, Diana Yekinni and Nnei Opia Clark, won in the audiobook fiction category.

A recent report from Ashley Woo, an associate policy researcher at RAND, drawing on data from the Spring 2025 American Instructional Resources Survey, offers insight into “concerns about the diminishing role of full books in schools.” The survey results suggest the peripheral nature of full-book reading in most secondary ELA classrooms, while showing that about two-thirds of teachers assigned only one to four books during the 2024-2025 school year. Teachers working with historically disadvantaged groups of students assigned fewer full books. 

The New York Times has profiled Keith McNally, author of the memoir I Regret Almost Everything (Gallery Books, 2025) and the 2026 winner of the $50,000 Gotham Book Prize. McNally, the restaurateur behind NYC establishments such as Balthazar, Cafe Luxembourg, and the Odeon, writes about the successes and failures he’s met throughout his life. Bradley Tusk, a cofounder of the prize, shared that the judging for this year’s award was unusual in that McNally’s memoir received eight of the twelve judges’ votes in the very first round. “I like the idea of rewarding someone for being as self-aware and as accountable as McNally sounds in I Regret Almost Everything.”

Pine State Publicity, a PR firm located in North Carolina and founded by Cassie Mannes Murray in 2022, is starting a boutique literary agency, reports Publishers Weekly. Per an announcement, Pine State Literary (PSL), which is being headed by Zoe-Aline Howard, will focus on “voice-driven adult literary fiction and narrative nonfiction.” Howard states that their books will “challenge what we consider ‘marketable,’ and…break away from oversaturated settings like NYC and LA.” Publishers that Howard feels share an affinity with PSL include the South Carolina-based Hub City Press as well as Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis.

A federal judge has ruled that Department of Government Effiicency (DOGE) acted unconstitutionally when it cancelled more than 1,400 previously-approved grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Times reports. While the ruling orders the cancellations rescinded, judge Colleen McMahon noted the “irreparable” damage done nonetheless: “The injury is not limited to the loss of money. It includes the disruption of protected expression, the interruption of ongoing research and publication, the cancellation or suspension of humanities programming, and the chilling effect caused by the government’s use of viewpoint-based and unauthorized criteria to terminate federal grants.” The terminations had previously come under additional scrutiny when it was revealed that DOGE employees had used ChatGPT to identify grants for cancellation based on keyword searches for terms including “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “equality,” “immigration,” and “citizenship.”

Ahead of Mother’s Day, novelist Lisa Owens reflects on the children’s literature that buoyed her family through its earliest days—and her affinity for the harried parents in those picture books’ margins. “The illustrations of the adults, though, were what captivated me: bleary-eyed, multitasking, pregnant, on the phone, clambered upon with glasses askew, cooking, affectionate, exhausted,” writes Owens for the New York Times. “Here was a vision of parenting in the round—the good, the bad and the will you please just go to bed. It brought me great comfort and relief.”

HarperCollins closed its most recent quarter with an 8 percent boost in sales, thanks in large part to the success of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry and other titles in the series, Publishers Weekly reports. “Digital sales accounted for 26 percent of revenue in the quarter, up 1 percent from a year ago. In addition to sales of Reid’s books, sales in the quarter benefitted from $6 million from recent acquisitions.”

USA Today looks at the new report by PEN America that shows the number of nonfiction books banned at schools has doubled. The report found that “3,743 unique titles were removed from school classrooms and libraries from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. There were 6,780 total bans across 23 states during that period, according to the organization.” More than 1,000 of the titles, or 29 percent of the total, were nonfiction, more than double the number from the previous year. PEN America says the rise in censorship is due to a widespread “embrace of anti-intellectualism” and that the data “mirrors the broader political attack on facts and knowledge and a skepticism, disdain, and devaluing of experts and expertise—tactics long associated with the rise of authoritarian regimes to sow distrust in democratic institutions.”

Shelf Awareness, the publisher of two newsletters focused on books, bookselling, and book reviews, recently alerted subscribers to the phishing schemes that have become ubiquitous in the publishing and writing communities. “We have learned that Shelf Awareness and its staff are being used in phishing attempts directed at book authors,” the editors wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter. “Shelf Awareness does not charge for review coverage. If you receive an offer over e-mail to review your book in return for payment, it is a scam, and you should not interact with the sender.”