Seven members of the Association of University Presses including Princeton University Press and Cambridge University Press have cofounded a new University Press Charter. The charter makes an argument for the importance and value of university presses and encourages publishers across the space to work together to ensure a bright future for scholarly publishing. “We are a diverse community, working across different disciplines, languages, regions, scales, and publishing models,” the charter states. “What connects us is a shared commitment to scholarship and to the institutions and communities that create, use, and sustain it.”

The Caine Prize for African Writing has confirmed that Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza did not use AI to write his award-winning story, the Associated Press reports. After Kundizeza’s story “The Blue Fighter” was announced as the winner of this year’s award in October, an Atlantic article alleged that an AI detection tool found the story to be almost entirely AI-generated. Kundizeza denied these claims. The Caine Prize then conducted an in-depth internal review, including interviews with the author and analysis of his drafts. “Alongside its decision to uphold the award, the Caine Prize announced new measures it said would strengthen safeguards against use of generative AI. They include AI declarations from publishers submitting stories and from all shortlisted writers, along with an ‘AI use policy for guidance,’” Farai Mutsaka writes.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending November 8, 2026. The lists, in fiction and nonfiction, are compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identify “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” This week on the fiction list, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) once more retains the top spot. New to the fiction list are Mona’s Eyes (Europa Editions) by Thomas Schlesser, at no. 15; The Naughty List Agreement: Advent Romance (One More Chapter) by Katherine Garbera, at no. 27; and Lightwing (Book two in the Crown of Hearts & Chaos series) (King’s Hollow) by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti, at no. 36.

British television personality and children’s author David Walliams has been accused of sexual misconduct, the Guardian reports. First-hand sources have alleged that Walliams used his power and celebrity to pursue young women, including at his former publisher HarperCollins, where he had a sexual relationship with a junior staffer. Details of the allegations have been revealed now that a court has rejected legal attempts Walliams made to prevent publication. “Lawyers for Walliams, who denies any wrongdoing, said his response was not a sign of guilt but rather a fear of public shame that came from deep-rooted trauma caused by childhood experience,” according to the Guardian.

Earlier this week, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of thirteen publishers in their lawsuit against WeLib, finding that the pirate website had copied and distributed books and articles without permission, according to Publishers Lunch. The ruling is a default judgment: WeLib never responded to the suit. Now, the site must pay damages of $19.5 million and destroy any copies of the plaintiffs’ works. “[T]he court has helped to highlight and bring a measure of justice to the industrial scale piracy faced everyday by the publishing enterprise,” Lui Simpson, the executive vice president of global policy for the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. “AI companies should not be patronizing pirate sites to source high-quality materials like books and journals for training large language models.”

The Whiting Foundation has announced that Martin Tsang will be its new executive director, effective immediately. Tsang joined the organization as its senior program officer last year after holding the same title at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tsang has a background in cultural anthropology and previously taught at the University of Miami, where he also served as the inaugural curator of Latin American collections and the librarian for the Cuban American collection. “I was drawn to Whiting for its long tradition of literary excellence, especially its support for emerging writers and ambitious works of nonfiction,” Tsang said in a press release. “I’m thrilled to lead the foundation’s distinctive work in cultural heritage preservation and its commitment to humanities education, and I look forward to deepening the impact of all our programs.”

Graywolf Press, the Porch Writers’ Collective, and One Story are the inaugural recipients of the Stylus Prize from the Literary Arts Fund, the Associated Press reports. They each received $250,000. The Stylus Prize is given to “honor literary arts nonprofits for making significant and essential contributions to writers creating new work and engaging readers,” according to the Literary Arts Fund.

British writer M. John Harrison won the Booker Prize for his novel The End of Everything, the first work of science fiction to take the prestigious literary award, the Los Angeles Times reports. At 81, Harrison also made history as the oldest writer to win the Booker, besting five other finalists, including previous winners Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, who had been the oddsmakers’ favorites, and Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout.

Legendary editor Gary Fisketjon, whose discovery and cultivation of authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, and Donna Tartt “earned him a reputation as one of the greatest literary editors of his generation,” according to the New York Times, died on Saturday at his home in Salem, Oregon. He was 72.

Former president Joe Biden has announced that he will be scaling back his upcoming book tour, according to USA Today. Biden’s memoir of his time in the White House, Promise Me, America, is being published next week by Little, Brown. But due to his ongoing battle with prostate cancer, Biden has decided to shorten his book tour. “Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me," Biden wrote in a social media post. “But sometimes it slows me down. What that means is, unfortunately, I won’t be able to do as many conversations about my book as I’d hoped. However, I’m hopeful the words on the page speak for themselves.”

A handful of new software tools promise to track and document an author’s writing process to help them prove that they didn’t use AI at any point in the writing process, WIRED reports. These tools also advertise themselves as a way to demonstrate provenance when text is scraped by AI without the writer’s permission or attribution. Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, has said she wants writers to know this kind of software exists but also doesn’t think the onus should be on authors to preemptively demonstrate that they didn’t use AI. “Rasenberger worries that authors are up against a climate of distrust—they should ‘refrain from accusations of other authors because it just does not support a healthy literary community,’ she says—and overconfidence in AI detection tools, which can be fooled and have been known to produce false positives,” Miles Klee writes.

Publishers Weekly has released the results of its 2026 PW Salary & Jobs Report. 886 people working across publishing were surveyed, 80 percent of whom identify as female and 79 percent of whom identify as white. Nearly 70 precent of respondents said they expect to be at the same company in two years’ time, either in their current role or at a higher level, though many also expressed concerns about the lack of advancement opportunities in publishing. “The trend of ‘the more publishing employees use AI the less they like it’ held true in the most recent survey,” Publishers Weekly adds. “73 percent of respondents reported that their company uses AI in some fashion, with market research the top function. However, perhaps because of all the controversy surrounding the use of AI in writing books, 77 percent of respondents said they have a negative view of the technology. The top concern is that respondents could get involved with publishing a book substantially written by AI.”

Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Splintered Harmony (Bloomsbury) sold just under a million copies in the first week following its release, Publishers Lunch writes. Rebecca Yarros, whose novel Threshing Day (Red Tower Books) sold over 857,000 copies this fall, still holds record for the fastest-selling adult book in the history of Circana Bookscan for Onyx Storm (Red Tower Books), which sold well over a million copies following its release in early 2025. “But Maas now looks to hold second place in the Bookscan record books,” according to Michael Cader.

Salon, one of the internet’s first and longest-running publications, is halting operations after thirty-one years, Deadline reports. The site was founded in the wake of a strike at the San Francisco Examiner in 1995, and became known through the Clinton and Bush years as a place for left-of-center news and criticism. “The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years,” the publication’s final post reads. “After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable. We know this news will be deeply disappointing to many of you, and we share that sadness.”

In the third quarter of 2026, HarperCollins’s revenue increased by 9 percent compared to the year prior, according to Publishers Weekly. Its parent company attributes these gains to strong sales of new releases including Whistler (HarperCollins) by Ann Patchett and R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story (William Morrow). Digital sales increased 6 percent, and audiobook sales specifically rose 13 percent, thanks at least in part to the company’s partnership with Spotify. Robert Thomson, the chief executive and director of HarperCollins’s parent company News Corp, adds that experiments with AI will likely trigger further evolution in the audiobook space. “AI is going to really provide a role in helping to bring books to life through these vivid voices and the ability to generate a compelling audio experience that makes the book even more valuable,” he is quoted saying. “There’s so many more choices in reading voices, sound effects and other techniques and tools and creativity that will bring words to life. And don’t forget as well how AI will enable much more cost-effective translations into multiple languages, both in text and audio and thus reach new audiences and generate new revenue.”

The largest public library systems in the country are seeing upticks in cardholder membership, circulation, and event attendance, NPR reports. Part of the reason for this shift is likely the rising cost of living, but many institutions have also gotten better at marketing themselves and making people aware of their wide array of offerings extending far beyond physical books. “People start off with Audible and then a friend tells them, ‘Why are you paying for that? You can get that at the library if you're a smidgen bit patient,’” Jeremy Reeder, director of the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona, is quoted saying.

Alexander: God, King, Man (St. Martin’s Press), a new biography of Alexander the Great by Edmund Richardson, has won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize, according to the Associated Press. The £50,000 (approximately $67,000) prize is given each year to a nonfiction book and has been “credited with bringing an eclectic slate of fact-based books to a wider audience.” Richardson is a professor of classics at Durham University in England and spent a decade researching the life of Alexander. The prize judges praised his book for being “a love letter to the humanities and the work of historians and archaeologists.”

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending November 1, 2026. The lists, in fiction and nonfiction, are compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identify “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” This week on the fiction list, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) once more retains the top spot. New to the fiction list are The Once and Future Queen: Deluxe Limited Edition (The Lives of Guinevere #1) (Erewhon Books) by Paula Lafferty, at no. 10; Of Karma and Corridors: A Dark Romance (Deluxe Limited Edition) (Podium Publishing) by Sloane St James, at no. 19; A Crimson Ridge Christmas: Deluxe Limited Edition (Kensington) by Elliott Rose, at no. 23; and The Summer Hikaru Died, Vol. 8 (Yen Press) by Mokumokuren, at no. 31.

Just a day after receiving France’s prestigious Prox Goncourt for his novel L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel) (Flammarion), Philippe Jaenada admitted on a French radio broadcast that he used AI three times while writing his book, Euronews reports. He said that he slipped a sentence written by ChatGPT into the text as a sort of inside joke and that he also used the technology for technical research. “I think we cannot push AI away, we cannot act as if it did not exist. We have to use it, we have to acknowledge it, we have to tame it and not let ourselves be replaced. It has to be useful,” Euronews quotes the author saying. This year’s Prix Goncourt already made headlines when one of the longlisted titles was withdrawn over allegations that its author, Thélyson Orélien, used AI to write his book.

Poet Grace Nichols has won the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize. The award of £10,000 (approximately $13,458) is given annually to a British woman writer over the age of sixty who overcame obstacles to having a successful literary career. Nichols was born in Guyana and has written numerous books for adults and children including I is a Long-Memoried Woman (Karnac House, 1983), for which she won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. “The word, pioneer, is an interesting one and my mind immediately flashed to when, as young students at the University of Guyana (our university education was free) we had to do a month’s national service before graduation. Dressed in military uniforms we served as ‘Young Pioneers’ in the forested region of Guyana as part of the government plan to develop a hydro-project scheme in our hinterland. Maybe that’s what we do as poets in the act of writing a poem or book, we’re like pioneers embarking on a new adventure with language in the forest of the imagination, finding a path true to our essential voice and vision, lighting things up from our own perspective,” Nichols said upon receiving the honor.