The French Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who is known for his criticism of religious extremism and authoritarianism, went missing after his arrival in Algiers on November 16, Morocco World News reports. Sansal has been detained in Algeria for over a week and is set to appear before a prosecutor in Algeria today. His lawyer, François Zimeray, has called for a fair trial and compliance with Algeria’s international commitments to human rights and legal principles. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, including Annie Ernaux, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, and Orhan Pamuk, among others, have signed a petition calling for Sansal’s release.

Funded by the Norwegian government and managed by the National Library in Oslo, the Jon Fosse prize for translators has been established to support “a partly invisible” and often poorly compensated profession at increasing risk of being replaced by AI, the Guardian reports. The prize will be one of the highest endowed literary awards in Europe, with one author each year earning 500,000 NOK (approximately $45,000) for making “a particularly significant contribution to translating Norwegian literature into another language.” The award will be for those translating from Bokmål and Nynorsk, the two official written standards of the Norwegian language. The winner of this year’s inaugural prize is Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, one of Fosse’s longstanding translators into German.

The recent disclosure of a decades-long relationship Cormac McCarthy had with Augusta Britt, who was sixteen when they met, has shocked many readers, but not scholars familiar with McCarthy’s life and letters, the New York Times reports. Britt described her relationship with McCarthy as consensual to Vanity Fair, but a debate has now ensued about the author’s legacy, and about how much Britt inspired the characters in his fiction.

Florida state attorneys have asked a federal judge to dismiss a book banning lawsuit filed by six major publishers, the Authors Guild, students, parents, and several authors, Publishers Weekly reports. The state claims that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the lawsuit, which challenges the new state law, HB 1069. Activists working to combat book banning maintain the law is fueling a rise in unconstitutional book bans in school libraries. The state argues: “The First Amendment does not require the government to provide access to particular materials in public-school libraries or to have school libraries at all.” A pre-trial conference is set for early December.

Bloomsbury has announced a distribution agreement with Spotify to make its catalogue of audiobooks available through Spotify’s “Audiobooks in Premium” offering. Bloomsbury’s catalogue will be available to Spotify Premium subscribers in the U.K., U.S., Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Listeners without a Premium subscription can purchase titles on an individual basis via Spotify. Authors on Bloomsbury’s list include William Dalrymple, Alan Moore, Madeline Miller, Dan Jones, Ann Patchett, and others, whose words are coupled with audiobook narrations by Meryl Streep, Emilia Clarke, Adjoa Andoh, and Jamie Lee Curtis, among others.

Trump’s promises to conservatives have increased fears of additional book bans, the Los Angeles Times reports. The recent election has emboldened conservative parental groups, including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, in their efforts to remove books they deem inappropriate for children. Trump’s threat to deny federal funding to schools that recognize transgender identities and studies could also affect curricula and library collections. Linda McMahon, Trump’s appointee as secretary of education, “chairs the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-connected organization that has criticized schools for teaching ‘racially divisive’ theories, notably about slavery and a perspective about the nation’s founding it views as anti-American.”

Microsoft has launched an imprint called 8080 Books (named after an Intel microprocessor) that aims to be faster than traditional book publishing, the Guardian reports. The imprint will focus on books related to technology, science, and business. “Technology has quickened the pace of almost every industry except publishing,” the company said in a statement. 8080 Books seeks to accelerate the process of manuscript to marketplace and will also reissue “significant works” and out of print books that remain relevant to contemporary readers.

Members of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and the Publishers Association of the West (PubWest) have merged into a single entity this week after a unanimous vote on November 13, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA, which was founded in 1983, has 3,000 members and is currently the largest trade association for publishing professionals in the United States. PubWest, which was founded in 1977, has about 150 members, who will be transferred into IBPA’s database. The organizations anticipate that combining will serve their collective interests and allow the associations to more easily share resources.

The winners of the 2024 National Book Awards were announced at a ceremony in New York City last night: Jason de León won in the nonfiction category for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books); Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won in the poetry category for Something About Living (University of Akron Press); Yáng Shuāng-zǐ won in the translated literature category for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), which was translated by Lin King; and Percival Everett won in the fiction category for James (Doubleday).

Tasha Sandoval writes for Public Books about a new and developing “abuelita canon” that features grandmothers, their sacrifices, and their legacies. She argues that these novels are “shedding light on the lives of the women who came before us: writing them into full human existence, beyond caricature.” The canon includes Catalina (One World, 2024) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Oye (Hogarth, 2024) by Melissa Mogollon, and Candelaria (Astra House, 2023) by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. (Read Ten Questions for Karla Cornejo Villavicencio). “Honest intergenerational conversations are what make the writing of this new abuelita canon possible,” Sandoval adds.

Anne Michaels was awarded the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held (Knopf) at a gala in Toronto on Monday while outside, pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested the Giller Foundation’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, which holds a stake in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the Toronto Star reports. The past year has been tumultuous for the Giller Foundation with multiple protests including an open letter signed by more than forty authors calling on the foundation to cut ties with Scotiabank, a separate letter signed by more than three hundred members of the literary community calling for a boycott of the prize, and two international judges stepping down from the prize’s committee. Though the Giller Prize removed Scotiabank from its name in early September, the bank remains the lead sponsor of the award. Michaels earned $100,000 with her win this week.

The independent distributor National Book Network (NBN), which was founded in 1986 by Jed Lyons, will close next year, and its 150 clients have been offered the chance to move to Simon & Schuster (S&S) Distribution Services, Publishers Weekly reports. After the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution in March, and the imminent closure of NBN, the largest independent distributor left in the United States is Independent Publishers Group. The distribution segment of the publishing industry is now dominated by the distribution divisions of Penguin Random House, S&S, Hachette, and Macmillan, as well as the distribution segment of Ingram Content Group, Ingram Publisher Services.

A new study in the journal Scientific Reports has found that nonexpert readers cannot consistently distinguish between poems written by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, or Sylvia Plath and Chat GPT 3.5 attempting to imitate each of them, the Washington Post reports. Readers even preferred the AI-generated verse, and were more likely to guess the AI-generated poems were written by humans than real works by renowned poets. In fact, the five poems most often judged to be written by AI were all penned by human writers.

Three candidates—Lindsay Cronk, the Dean of Libraries at Tulane University; Andrea Jamison, an assistant professor of school librarianship at Illinois State University; and Maria McCauley, the director of libraries at the Cambridge Public Library in Massachusetts—are under consideration for the role of president of the American Library Association (ALA) from 2026–2027, Publishers Weekly reports. Ballot mailing for the ALA election will begin on March 10, 2025, and end on April 2, 2025.

HarperCollins has confirmed it has plans to sell authors’ work to an AI technology company, 404 Media reports. A spokesperson for HarperCollins said, “While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity…. HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models.” One HarperCollins author, Daniel Kibblesmith, who received a non-negotiable one-time offer of $2,500 to include his book in the AI deal, said, “I see it as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time and space, or readers who are satisfied with a customized on-demand content pellet fed to them by the big computer so they never have to be challenged again.”

Barnes & Noble has announced the sale of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc. to Hachette Book Group. Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling in 2003 and the publisher now includes adult imprints Union Square & Co., Puzzelwright Press, Sterling Ethos, and SparkNotes as well as several children’s and gift and stationary imprints. Since 2021, Sterling has been led by Emily Meehan, who oversaw the publisher’s rebranding in January 2022 to Union Square & Co.

Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China in the ongoing suppression of dissent and free speech but Chinese-language bookstores are thriving abroad, the Associated Press reports. At least a dozen bookstores in China have been shut down in the last few months, and the climate has been “chilling” for China’s publishing industry. In recent years, however, Chinese bookstores have appeared in Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United States due to the policing of free expression in China and growing Chinese communities abroad.

Unionized bookstore workers held a rally outside the Barnes & Noble flagship store in New York City on November 14 in advance of holiday sales, Publishers Weekly reports. The rally, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, was part of efforts to reach a contract with workers by the end of the year, with an agreement on wages being the final major point to negotiate. Workers from Barnes & Noble, Book Culture, Greenlight, McNally Jackson, and the Strand Book Store were in attendance.

Stephen King, the Guardian, and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia are among those who have said they will stop posting on X (formerly Twitter), due to concerns about disturbing content on the social media platform, the Guardian reports. King noted a “toxic” atmosphere, and La Vanguardia said the site had become an “echo chamber” for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Elizabeth Nunez, a Trinidad-born academic and writer whose fiction explored family obligations, the pernicious effects of colonialism, and the immigrant’s nostalgia for home, has died, the New York Times reports. Dr. Nunez was the author of eleven novels, including her most recent title, Now Lila Knows (Akashic Books, 2022), and served as the director of the National Black Writers Conference from 1986 to 2000. Dr. Nunez wrote about her homeland, but also resisted the reduction of her identity. She told the Miami Herald in 2006: “I don’t mind being classified as a Caribbean writer, as long as it’s a subcategory in literary fiction.” Read Dr. Nunez’s essay, “Widening the Path: The Importance of Publishing Black Writers” in the January/February 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.