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Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
Print book sales through the first nine months of 2025 are down about 1 percent from the comparable period in 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. According to data provided by Circana BookScan, the category with the steepest decline in sales is Adult Nonfiction, down 2 percent, while Children’s Nonfiction rose 2.7 percent. Adult Fiction was down 1.3 percent over last year.
A new collection of poems by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney contains a selection of verse never before seen in book form, including poems that “originally appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines under different pen names” and other previously unpublished poems housed in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, “where the poet bequeathed his works before his death in 2013,” the BBC reports. The Poems of Seamus Heaney was recently published in the U.K. by Faber and is forthcoming in November from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyoming, was awarded a $700,000 settlement after she was fired two years ago for refusing to remove books with sexual content and LGBTQ themes from the library, the New York Times reports. The federal lawsuit accused the county, its board of commissioners, the library board, and members of both government boards of violating her First Amendment right to free speech “and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way.”
Erin Somers of Publisher Lunch reports on the “chaos” at Baker & Taylor, the book distributor that earlier this week announced it would close following the cancellation of its acquisition by ReaderLink. “Staffers, even those in supervisory positions, report that they do not have any information about what the ‘wind down’ of the company will look like. It is unclear whether books are still shipping to accounts, whether customers will get refunds, or whether books will be returned to publishers. Employees also don’t have language or information to relay to their customers,” Somers writes. Ingram, meanwhile, is “rolling out a new cataloging and processing system” to help onboard new customers.
Lucas Schaefer, Scott Anderson, and Thao Lam are the winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes, given annually for works of exceptional merit in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Schaefer won the prize in fiction for his debut novel, The Slip (Simon & Schuster); Anderson won the nonfiction award for King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday); and Lam won the prize in young readers’ literature for Everbelly (Groundwood). Each winner received $50,000.
The Swedish Academy today announced that it had awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” His most recent book published in English is Herscht 17769 (New Directions, 2024), translated by Ottilie Mulzetan, an experimental novel written in a single continuous sentence about a character named Florian Herscht who attempts to warn Chancellor Angela Merkel about the world’s impending destruction.
The MacArthur Foundation today announced the 2025 MacArthur Fellows, including fiction writer Tommy Orange. The MacArthur Fellowship is a “no-strings-attached” award “in support of people, not projects.” Each fellowship comes with an award of $800,000 paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.
Scarlett Pavlovich’s sexual assault lawsuit against Neil Gaiman has been dismissed by a Wisconsin federal judge, Vulture reports. “The judge did not rule on the facts of the case, but rather that the suit should have been filed in New Zealand and not Wisconsin.” Pavlovich has accused the author “of assaulting her while she worked as the nanny to his and then-wife Amanda Palmer’s child” at Palmer’s home on Waiheke Island. Palmer had filed for divorce from Gaiman in 2022, two years before Pavlovich and other women accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct and assault. Pavlovich “filed on human-trafficking charges under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, choosing Wisconsin as the venue for the suit because Gaiman has a residence there.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina yesterday filed a lawsuit against State Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver citing “unjust book bans,” on behalf of the South Carolina Association of School Librarians and three public school students, Book Riot reports. Regulation 43-170, which became law in June 2024, “bans all materials in public kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms if that material contains any ‘sexual conduct.’ The regulation has led to the banning of 22 books across the state, putting South Carolina at the top of the list for most state-sanctioned book bans.”
Library distributor Baker & Taylor (B&T), the acquistion of which by ReaderLink was recently canceled, is shutting down, Publishers Weekly reports. “As a result, B&T let go about 520 employees yesterday and plans to wind down the business by January. Employees who were laid off had their severance plans canceled as well. B&T had undergone some layoffs earlier this year, but recently had as many as 1,500 full-time and part-time employees.”
The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2025 National Book Awards. The finalists in poetry are Gabrielle Calvocoressi for The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press), Cathy Linh Che for Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press), Tiana Clark, for Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press), Richard Siken for I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press), and Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner). The finalists in fiction are Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Karen Russell, for The Antidote (Knopf), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), and Bryan Washington, Palaver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The finalists in nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature can be found on the National Book Foundation’s website. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on November 19.
The Maine Arts Commission is taking applications for the next Maine State Poet Laureate. The selected poet will serve a five-year term beginning July 1, 2026, and concluding June 30, 2031. “The laureate is charged with advancing public appreciation for poetry through community engagement, events, and projects, as well as supporting the Commission’s administration of the national Poetry Out Loud program.” The position comes with an honorarium of $5,000 per year for five years. Eligible applicants must be full-time Maine residents “with a distinguished body of poetic work.” The state’s current poet laureate is Julia Bouwsma.
Sophia Nguyen of the Washington Post speculates about who might win the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. Among the guesses are Chinese fiction writer Can Xue, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, Australian fiction writer Gerald Murnane, and Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas.
Book editor Chuck Adams has died, Publishers Lunch reports. A longtime editor at Algonquin Books, Adams was the subject of an early installment of the Agents & Editors series, telling contributing editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler in 2008: “I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they’re definitely not about editors—they’re about readers. You’ve got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you’re telling. You can’t just write down words that sound pretty. It’s all about the reader.” Adams was honored with the Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, the nonprofit organization that publishes Poets & Writers Magazine, in 2013.
It is officially Banned Books Week, an annual event highlighting “the value of free and open access to information” and bringing together “the entire book community—librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types—in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.” The week leads up to a call to action on Let Freedom Read Day, October 11.
Quirk Books, the publisher of titles such as the debut novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) by Ransom Riggs and the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, has been sold to Andrews McMeel Publishing, according to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch.
Richard Flannagan has rejected the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize for his latest book, Question 7 (Knopf, 2024), after he failed to persuade the sponsor, fund management firm Baillie Gifford, to divest from its hydrocarbon interests, the Times reports. “It can also be revealed that Baillie Gifford—which was effectively hounded out of its long-standing sponsorship of literary festivals by activist campaigns—has not yet committed to continuing its sponsorship of the nonfiction prize.”
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, the New York Times reports. Six Nobel Prizes are awarded every year; the other fields recognized are medicine (“awarded on Monday to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries around peripheral immune tolerance”), physics, chemistry, economic science, and peace work.
The Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association and the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association have announced that Ross Gay has been selected as the recipient of the 2025 Voice of the Heartland Award. The annual honor “celebrates individuals who exemplify the values and spirit of independent bookselling, and whose work resonates deeply with readers and communities across the region.” Gay, the author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy as well as four books of poetry, will receive the award during the Heartland Fall Forum Book Awards ceremony on October 14.
The Association of American Publishers will present its annual International Freedom to Publish Award to Freedom Letters, a Russian publishing house “that operates out of Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia, and other locations, and has released hundreds of works in Russian and Ukrainian by anti-war writers and other opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Associated Press reports. The award will also honor its founder, Georgy Urushadze, “a onetime literary prize official in Moscow who fled in 2022 after opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and being designated a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian government.”
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is conducting a new case review of the death of “gonzo journalist” and author Hunter S. Thompson, who died in 2005, NBC News reports. Thompson’s death had been ruled a suicide. “The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office recently referred the case to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation after his widow, Anita Thompson, requested a review into the agency’s original investigation.”
In the New York Times, Elisa Gabbert looks back at four decades of the annual book series Best American Poetry, the final installment of which was recently published by Scribner, and ponders the act of curation and the implications of the adjective Best. “In any given volume, the ratio of poems I find appealing to not is about the same as it would be in a good journal.... Reading through my stack of ‘BAP’s, I was struck by the randomness of it all,” Gabbert writes.
A new website containing a searchable database of works eligible for the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, as well as a portal for filing claims, was recently launched, Publishers Lunch reports. “Authors who think their books might have been pirated can search the Anthropic works list by title, author, publisher, or ISBN, and the site will provide a US Copyright Office registration number they will need to file a claim.”
At least fifteen libraries at U.S. colleges and universities have been the targets of bomb threats in the past week, according to Book Riot. “Officials have linked these bomb threats, as well as less location-specific threats received this week, as part of a swatting effort. Swatting is criminal harassment that purposefully deceives law enforcement into believing there is an emergency at a particular address, encouraging a significant response. It can be considered an act of stochastic terrorism.”
Solange Knowles has launched the Saint Heron Community Library, “a literary center dedicated to students, artists, creatives and general book/literature enthusiasts interested in exploring and studying the breadth of artistic expression.” The library, containing primarily out-of-print, rare, and first-edition books by writers of color, is free of charge and allows each borrower to reserve one book, which will be shipped directly to the borrower for a term of forty-five days, with complimentary shipping and return postage, “ensuring the library remains free to readers.”
Bookshop.org has launched an e-book platform in the U.K. that allows independent bookstores to sell digital books, the Guardian reports. Stores will keep 100 percent of the profits.
Chapter Ukraine, a collaboration among Ukrainian Book Institute, Craft magazine, PEN Ukraine, and others, is working “to make Ukrainian literature more accessible worldwide” by offering “comprehensive information about Ukrainian books available in translation,” according to Publishing Perspectives. “Initially, the focus has been on the United States’ English-language audience, the home of a volunteer communications campaign to support the effort. That advocacy is calibrated ‘to raise awareness among international readers and expand the presence of Ukrainian books on library and bookstore shelves’ at international scale.”
Patrizia Zelano, an Italian photographer, captured images of century-old books she salvaged from historic flooding in Venice in November 2019, when the combination of strong winds, a tidal peak, and a fast-moving cyclone resulted in 85 percent of the city being underwater, the BBC reports. “On her two-day adventure, Zelano salvaged 40 books. Though most are now unreadable, her photographs of the ruined books tell the story of the fragility of the lagoon and its cultural heritage—as well as a push towards possible solutions.”
PEN America has released its list of the most-banned books of the 2024–2025 school year, warning that a “disturbing normalization of censorship” is happening in public schools, where the number of books challenged or banned has risen exponentially, NPR reports. “According to the new report, the most-banned book in the country in the 2023-24 school year was Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, followed by Patricia McCormick’s 2006 young adult title Sold, a fictional account of a girl sold into sexual slavery in India that was named one of the American Library Association’s best YA books.”
CNN looks at Africa’s book publishing industry in light of a report by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that estimates Africa’s publishing industry generated only $7 billion in 2023, accounting for just 5.4 percent of the global book market, which is valued at $129 billion. “Today, you see that most of the names of authors of literature in Africa are more known outside the continent than inside the continent. They’re known in their country, but they’re not circulating between the other countries, and that’s an issue,” says Ernesto Ottone Ramírez, assistant director-general for culture at UNESCO. The report blames “weak polices, an absence of tax incentives, and a reliance on imported books for the lack of industry growth within Africa.”
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation recently announced the winners of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Kaveh Akbar won in the fiction category for Martyr! (Random House); Priscilla Morris is the runner-up for Black Butterflies (Knopf). Sunil Amrith won the nonfiction prize for The Burning Earth: A History (Norton); Lauren Markham is the runner-up for A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Random House). The winners each receive $10,000; the runners-up each receive $5,000. The foundation also announced that Salman Rushdie is the recipient of the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.
The supermarket chain Publix is facing calls for a boycott after withdrawing as the sponsor of the Black Book Bash in Jacksonville, Florida, just days before the event, Atlanta Black Star reports. “The three-day festival, set for Oct. 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency, is a celebration of Black literature and culture where readers can meet authors, shop from Black-owned businesses, and visit vendors and bookstores. Publix had been positioned as the title sponsor, but organizers say the company abruptly pulled out, citing the ‘political climate.’” Organizers insist the festival will go on. “This is bigger than books. This is about Black stories. Black joy. Black freedom,” they wrote in a statement on Instagram.
The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, an annual award for “outstanding debut literary works by first-generation immigrants,” has a new name, the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, after Steven Kellman, “a comparative literature professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and longtime Restless board member,” donated $300,000 to the award’s sponsor, Restless Books, Publishers Weekly reports.
ReaderLink’s deal to acquire book distributor Baker & Taylor that was in place and scheduled to close last week has been terminated, Publishers Lunch reports. Baker & Taylor is the largest supplier of library content, software, and services to public and academic libraries in the United States. “Baker & Taylor’s open invoices with publishers were to remain with the current owners, and publishers were expressing concern about getting paid,” Michael Cader writes. There has been no formal statement about why the deal was terminated.
In an effort to generate new interest in Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, curators have refurbished a 1916 quarter grand piano that belonged to the author’s wife, Estelle Oldman, the New York Times reports. “The instrument was refurbished this summer, and on Thursday evening its fuller, back-in-tune notes rang through the parlor once again during a concert marking Faulkner’s birthday. Rowan Oak’s curators hope it will be the first of many such evenings.”
Trinity University Press will cease operations at the end of 2026 due to rising costs and in response to, as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Antonio is quoted as stating, “strategic needs of the university,” Publishers Weekly reports. The report comes less than a month after Bucknell University Press in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, announced that it, too, would close next year.
Oregon ArtsWatch surveys the literary landscape in Oregon amid moves by the Trump administration to shutter the Institute for Museum & Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The actions have led to turmoil among Oregon’s arts, cultural, and literary organizations,” Amanda Waldroupe writes. Among the literary organizations affected are Fishtrap, a writing center in Enterprise, Oregon, that declined funding from the NEA because, as executive director Shannon McNerney wrote, “the current policies of the NEA no longer align with Fishtrap’s mission and values.”
The Stanford Daily takes stock of Stanford University’s creative writing program a year after the school announced it was phasing out all twenty-three of the creative writing lecturers over the course of the next two years. “Many students and lecturers have expressed their disappointment in the decision in the last year. According to lecturer Sarah Frisch, last year was the first time she was able to receive a livable wage due to the lecturers’ previous year of advocating for a pay raise. This was her last year.”
The California federal judge presiding over Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlment has granted preliminary approval of the deal to resolve authors’ class action lawsuit over the AI company’s downloading of millions of pirated books, Bloomberg reports. “Anthropic will pay about $3,000 for each of the 482,460 books it downloaded from pirate libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and destroy the original and copied files. The parties struck a deal in August after the AI startup said it faced ‘inordinate pressure’ to settle and avoid paying upwards of $1 trillion in statutory damages at a trial scheduled for December.”
The American Booksellers Association has named LeVar Burton as its Indie Bookstore Ambassador for 2025-2026, Publishers Weekly reports. “As ambassador, Burton will champion indie bookstores, especially on Small Business Saturday (Nov. 29, 2025) and Independent Bookstore Day (Apr. 25, 2026).” Burton is the latest in a line of ambassadors that includes Celeste Ng, Amanda Gorman, and Trevor Noah.
“Nightmare,” a previously unpublished short story by Ramond Chandler, has been published by the Strand magazine, the Guardian reports. The magazine’s managing editor, Andrew Gulli, discovered the story “among a cache of papers belonging to Chandler’s secretary and later-life companion Jean Vounder-Davis.”
The New York Times raises questions about billionaire author Amy Griffin’s best-selling memoir The Tell, published by the Dial Press in March and lauded by celebrity influencers from Oprah Winfrey to Reese Witherspoon, in which Griffin writes about engaging in “illegal psychedelic-drug therapy,” during which she “recovered memories of being raped on many occasions by a middle-school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, starting when she was 12.” Online reviews as well as the Times reporters themselves, Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan, question the legitimacy of memories retrieved under the influence of MDMA and point to a lack of fact-checking for most memoirs. “Book publishers are not investigators,” Whitney Frick, the author’s editor at the Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is quoted as saying. “This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.”
Publishers Weekly reports on the findings of a recent survey by the Book Industry Study Group that shows nearly half of book industry professionals are using artificial intelligence tools, but 98 percent report “significant concerns” about AI. “The survey, conducted this summer, covered 559 North American industry professionals, and included publishers, libraries, manufacturers, individual consultants, retailers, and service providers. It found that 46 percent of individuals and 48 percent of organizations reported using AI tools, while revealing various reservations and worries.”
The Los Angeles Times looks at the booming audiobook business in which actors are vying for audiobook roles “at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate.” Some narrators, including well-known actors for the screen, enjoy consistent bookings, while most others face lower wages, increased competition, and “the looming specter of AI-generated narration.”
The judges of the 2025 Booker Prize have announced the shortlist for the prestigious award. The authors in the running are Susan Choi for Flashlight, Kiran Desai for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Katie Kitamura for Audition, Benjamin Markovits for The Rest of Our Lives, Andrew Miller for The Land in Winter, and David Szalay for Flesh. The winner, who will receive £50,000 (approximately $67,201), will be announced at a ceremony in London on November 10.
Jed Kudrick and Sean DiLeonardi study decades of the New York Times best-seller list for Public Books to provide an overview of three eras “in which the popularity of translated works suddenly rises” in the United States. “Each wave leads to a blossoming of linguistic and generic trends within the market before dissipating rapidly. Between these waves, in the trenches, bestsellers in translation fall to nearly zero.” According to their analysis, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest spent nearly eighty weeks among the top 10 books on the list, which means the 2008 novel spent the longest time on the best-seller list “of any translated novel—from any language—ever.”
Boris Kachka writes for the Atlantic about the new microgenre in publishing: books about artificial intelligence. “The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride, fictionalize, and occasionally incorporate AI.”
The Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction, open to unpublished writers without an agent living in the UK or Ireland, is being launched on the third anniversary of the author’s death, the BBC reports. The winner would of the biennial prize will receive “a cash prize, mentoring from an agent and a place on an Arvon Foundation residential writing course.” Mantel, best known for Wolf Hall, published seventeen books over four decades before her death from complications of a stroke in 2022.
A federal judge in Florida has dismissed the defamation lawsuit against Penguin Random House and four New York Times reporters that was filed by President Trump’s lawyers last week, the New York Times reports. The suit accused the book publisher and newspaper of disparaging Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman and asked for $15 billion in damages. “Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, said the president’s 85-page complaint was unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. He criticized Mr. Trump’s lawyers for waiting until the 80th page to lodge a formal allegation of defamation, and for including, ahead of it, dozens of ‘florid and enervating’ pages lavishing praise on the president and enumerating a range of grievances.”
