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Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt shortlisted for Dylan Thomas prize

Six writers are now finalists for the prestigious annual prize, which awards £20,000 to a writer aged 39 or under

Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Harriet Armstrong, Colwill Brown, Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Suzannah V Evans also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under, in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

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Future of William Wordsworth’s Lake District home secured for the public

Romantic poet’s Rydal Mount and Gardens, marketed for over £2.5m, will remain open under Wordsworth Trust

It was the family home where William Wordsworth hosted Alfred, Lord Tennyson, lived as poet laureate and worked on his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude.

Now, after a long period of decline in visitor numbers, Rydal Mount and Gardens has been saved from descending into the “half-choked with willow flowers and weeds” state that Wordsworth described in his 1814 poem The Excursion – and will be preserved by a charity that will ensure it remains open to the public.

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When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review – the Indiana Jones of trees returns

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologists

It’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”

The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a try: few people can speak about trees with quite as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she is a Canadian national treasure and global environmental icon. When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she describes once sprinting through the forest with a syringe filled with radioactive isotopes in each hand as she is chased by a grizzly bear.

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Len Deighton, spy novelist and author of The Ipcress File, dies aged 97

British writer brought wit, realism and class consciousness to cold war espionage fiction, reshaping the genre in the 1960s

Len Deighton, the British author whose subversive spy novels helped redefine the genre in the 1960s, has died aged 97.

Best known for his debut, The Ipcress File, Deighton went on to write more than 30 books over a career spanning four decades, establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in postwar fiction. His work, often compared to that of John le Carré, combined meticulous research with wit and sharp observations about class and bureaucracy.

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The Delusions by Jenni Fagan review – an afterlife of queues and bureaucracy

A witty metaphysical satire about what happens when the processes that help souls pass on begin to fail

Jenni Fagan’s satirical fifth novel, The Delusions, opens with an epigraph from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction curiosity Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” The afterthought leaks back into the original statement, underpinning and undermining everything.

Infinity and eternity are both unavoidably present in The Delusions, which takes place in a vast anteroom to the afterlife, “the largest soul terminus in existence”. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a big-box store, where they help you sort your false perceptions of yourself from what you actually were, before you’re Processed and sent on to whatever comes next (or, should you fail the Questionnaire, Dissolved on the spot). Though to be honest, no one in Processing is certain what that next thing is.

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Better than Wuthering Heights? The Brontës’ novels – ranked!

As Emerald Fennell’s film sparks debate, we celebrate the pioneering brilliance of the siblings’ work

This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a male narrator, William Crimsworth, it offers a downbeat story of everyday middle-class striving as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher to see it thought it showed promise, despite being too short and insufficiently “striking and exciting”. Had the author anything else to offer? Luckily, Jane Eyre – which amply supplied the earlier book’s deficiencies – was already in train and was soon accepted with alacrity. Although The Professor remained unpublished in Charlotte’s lifetime, she continued to believe that it was “as good as I can write”; its subtly ironised male voice reveals her underlying literary sophistication.

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London book fair roundup: Idris Elba’s thriller deal, the rise of romcom, and fights against censorship

The actor led the starry book deals, while publishers assessed whether US-style bans are spreading to the UK

The annual London book fair wrapped on Thursday, marking the end of three days that saw 33,000 people connected to the book industry – agents, publishers, authors, among others – gather at Olympia to make deals and discuss the state of the publishing world, and its future. Here’s our roundup of the biggest deals, trends and takeaways from the fair.

The starriest book deal of the week was a new thriller series co-authored by Idris Elba, featuring an MI6 field operative who gets deployed to Mauritius to investigate an attempted murder. Elsewhere, rights were scooped for Alex Ferguson’s first autobiography in 13 years, broadcaster Mishal Husain’s debut children’s book, and the story of designer Paul Smith’s life.

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Margareta Magnusson, Swedish ‘death cleaning’ author, dies age 92

Magnusson’s 2017 bestseller The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning turned the Scandinavian decluttering practice into a global phenomenon

Swedish author and artist Margareta Magnusson, whose book on “death cleaning” became a global phenomenon, has died aged 92.

Magnusson’s 2017 book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, introduced international readers to the concept of döstädning – the practice of sorting through and giving away possessions in later life so that family members are not left with the burden of doing so after one’s death.

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The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby review – the story of the man who changed the world

A journalist charts the progress of AI pioneer Demis Hassabis from child chess prodigy to Nobel prize winner

It was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo – a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind.

“Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented,” game designer Alex Randolph once said. “Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered.” Something about the ancient Chinese duel, where players place stones on a grid, trying to capture territory, feels fundamental – inevitable, even. Chess had fallen to the robots nearly 20 years earlier, when DeepBlue beat Kasparov, but Go, with its vast decision space (there are far more legal board positions than atoms in the observable universe) remained a plucky holdout.

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Shahrnush Parsipur: ‘The women of Iran will cause the fall of the Islamic Republic’

As her banned 1989 novella, Women Without Men, is published for the first time in the UK, the Iranian author looks back on a life of resistance and repression

As I write this, Iranians around the world are holding their breath for the end of the murderous Islamic Republic. More than three years after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement began, amid renewed demonstrations, brutal state crackdowns and now US bombing raids, Shahrnush Parsipur’s banned novella Women Without Men arrives in the UK, where last month it was longlisted for the 2026 International Booker prize.

At 80 years old, Parsipur is one of Iran’s most celebrated living writers, and one of our boldest, most original feminists. In the 1980s, her stories were the talk of Iran’s literary circles and she was imprisoned for nearly five years, without ever being formally charged.

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