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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.
Publishers Weekly has named Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya as the 2025 Person of the Year. “With book banning efforts sharply on the rise a few years ago, it became clear to many, including...Malaviya, that the challenges weren’t one-offs but rather part of an organized, well-funded operation. To counter that campaign, Malaviya decided to throw the full weight of the country’s largest trade publisher into marshaling the opposition.”
Audible is partnering with TikTok “to help listeners discover top trending books and stories right inside the Audible app and web experience.” The collaboration creates “a seamless bridge” between what’s trending on BookTok and what listeners can access on Audible.
Best-selling author James Patterson has once again given “holiday bonus” checks of $500 each to independent booksellers, the Associated Press reports. “Over the past twenty years, Patterson has donated millions of dollars to schools, libraries, literacy programs and others in the book community. For the past several years, he has made a tradition out of sending $500 checks to 600 independent booksellers who have been recommended by peers or patrons. The list for 2025 ranges from Katie Gabriello, social media coordinator for Whitelam Books in Reading, Massachusetts, to store manager Kate Czyzewski of Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake, New Jersey.”
Willamette University and Pacific University have announced plans to merge into a new private university system, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. If the merger goes through, the proposed new system, tentatively called the University of the Northwest, would become the state’s largest private university with more than 6,000 students. Both Willamette and Pacific universities currently have low-residency MFA programs in creative writing. “Higher education institutions across the country are facing declining enrollment and budget difficulties, but leaders at Pacific and Willamette say they’re not pursuing the partnership due to financial challenges. They say the partnership will lead to better services and expanded career pathways for students, as well as create a regional workforce development hub.”
Darrell Kinsey is the winner of the Center for Fiction’s 2025 First Novel Prize for Natch (University of Iowa Press). “Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2024 First Novel Prize–winning novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, presented Kinsey with the award, which carries with it a prize of $15,000.”
Elaina Richardson is stepping down as president of the artist and writers retreat Yaddo, the New York Times reports. She has held the post for twenty-five years, during which time “she has increased Yaddo’s endowment from $8 million to $38 million and overseen significant upgrades to the 400-acre former summer home of Spencer and Katrina Trask, a financier and a writer who, after the deaths of their four young children, bequeathed their estate to artists seeking respite from the demands of everyday life.”
Oxford University Press has sold its New York City offices on Madison Avenue for $40 million, Publishers Weekly reports. “The sale comes just one week after Scholastic announced the sale of its own Manhattan headquarters, in addition to its primary warehouse located in Jefferson City, Mo., and plans to lease back part of the properties. Net proceeds for the Scholastic deal are expected to top $400 million.”
The second annual State of Reading Report, compiled by Social reading app Fable and digital subscription service Everand using the reponses of more than 1,600 users, shows that people “are finding increasing ways to weave reading into daily life,” with 64 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds reading more; “audiobooks have overtaken ebooks as the top digital format, and smartphones are the top device”; readers’ comfort level with and usage of AI has risen but people still trust humans more; and fantasy titles such as Onyx Storm, Iron Flame, and Fourth Wing topped the most-read list among users.
The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County, a book removal case in Texas “that jeopardizes First Amendment rights in public libraries,” according to Publishers Weekly. It would have been the first book-banning case to be heard by the court since 1982. The original lawsuit, filed in April 2022 by seven library patrons in Llano, Texas, was filed after seventeen books were removed from the Llano branch library. “Publishers, librarians, and literary organizations had petitioned SCOTUS for a writ of certiorari, the process by which SCOTUS decides whether to take a case, but to no avail.” One of the plantiffs, Leila Green Little, wrote in an e-mail to Publishers Weekly, “This means we now live in a censorship state.”
The Whiting Foundation is partnering with the Brooklyn-based literary public relations firm Press Shop PR to “provide strategic publicity guidance to this year’s awardees” of the Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress, Publishers Weekly reports. The 2025 grantees are Paul Bogard, Jason Cherkis, S.C. Cornell, Caitlin Dickerson, Elena Dudum, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Will Harris, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Avi Steinberg, and Raksha Vasudevan.
Netflix says book adaptations are driving viewership, according to Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch. “In 2025...adaptations amassed more than 4.5 billion views around the world for movies and series including Frankenstein, The Woman in Cabin 10, The Hunting Wives, The Thursday Murder Club, and Ransom Canyon, and book-to-screen content has been in the streamer’s global Top 10 list every week this year.”
Novelist Elif Shafak has been named the new president of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, the Guardian reports. Shafak, who has been vice president since 2020, takes over from Bernardine Evaristo, who is nearly finished with her four-year term.
László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian author who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature, gave a lecture in Stockholm on Sunday in a rare public appearance, the Los Angeles Times reports. “He introduced his lecture, according to the English translation, by saying that ‘on receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, I originally wished to share my thought with you on the subject of hope, but as my stories of hope have definitely come to an end, I will now speak about angels.’” The seventy-one-year-old writer described new angels as “wingless, messageless beings among us searching for human recognition.”
The notebooks of French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus have been published as a single volume for the first time, offering an unprecented glimpse into the thinking of the intensely private writer, the New York Times reports. Not to be confused with personal diaries, the notebooks contain the writer’s preparatory musings for such works as The Stranger and The Fall and include “explorations not just of the absurdity of existence but of isolation, guilt, redemption and resilience.” Other commentary is less searching and more candid: “‘I always wonder why I attract socialites,’ he wrote in 1949. ‘All those hats!’”
Following Valsoft’s recent acquisition of Above the Treeline (ATL), developer of the catalog platform Edelweiss, ATL has started to implement price increases on publishers using the digital cataloging service, negatively impacting small and big presses alike, reports Publishers Weekly. “…[T]hese changes in prices have made it difficult to carry out the vital task of ensuring independent bookstores can access the information they need on our full portfolio of titles,” notes one anonymous sales director with a big New York City publisher. Industry members are discussing the possibility of a new competitor coming along that can match the work of Edelweiss for cheaper.
In an interview with the BBC’s Big Boss Interview podcast, James Daunt, founder of the British bookstore chain Waterstones and current CEO of Barnes & Noble, spoke to the place of AI-authored titles on a bookshop’s shelf. “Do I think that our booksellers are likely to put those kind of books front and center? I would be surprised,” Daunt said, but noted that Waterstones would stock “what publishers publish” so long as books using artificial intelligence were clearly labeled, and so long as readers wanted them, the BBC reports.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will reinstate grants that had been terminated earlier this year by the Trump administration, NPR reports. The turn comes after attorneys general in twenty-one states filed lawsuit against the executive order that led to the termination of the grants; in November, a Rhode Island District Court judge ruled this action unlawful, releasing funds “that had been stuck in a months-long limbo.” Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Association, called the development a “massive win” for libraries in all states, but noted that “the fight is not finished,” as the administration may appeal the ruling and IMLS funding remains subject to congressional approval.
Spotify Wrapped is now offering audiobook listening hours and other personalized data, USA Today reports. “It’s been two years since Spotify began offering fifteen monthly audiobook listening hours under its Premium Plan. Last year, the streaming giant released the top global titles and authors. This year, you can see your reading analyzed alongside your music in Wrapped.”
Porter Anderson, the editor in chief of Publishing Perspectives, has died. Anderson led Publishing Perspectives since 2016. In 2019 he was awarded International Trade Press Journalist of the Year at the London Book Fair. He also cofounded the Hot Sheet newsletter, now known as the Bottom Line, with Jane Friedman.
For the Los Angeles Times, six writers remember Joan Didion for what would have been her 91st birthday. “The more I read Joan, the more I understand that without realizing it, perhaps, she was a philosopher of sorts—largely about the American arrival myth, and what that dream looks like, or doesn’t look like,” Hilton Als says.
Wyatt Williams writes in the New York Times Magazine about the new film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which arrives just as a new biography of the writer, Ted Geltner’s Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, is published by the University of Iowa Press. “The biography shines an uncomfortably bright spotlight on an author who often chose to remain half in the shadow. Geltner’s reporting demystifies the troubled period of Johnson’s life that shaped Jesus’ Son and leaves the reader with, among other things, a set of damning facts. They present a portrait of a man who...had good reason to be haunted by what he had done. That understanding may even change how we read Johnson’s last, enigmatic novella.”
PEN America will honor best-selling author Ann Patchett with the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award at its annual gala on May 14, 2026. The organization will also honor Oscar-nominated film producer Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse, with the Business Visionary award.
The British Ukrainian writer Marina Lewycka was posthumously awarded the Vintage Bollinger prize, a special award marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, the Guardian reports. Lewycka, who died last month at the age of 79, won the award for her 2005 novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
Sam Kriss writes in the New York Times Magazine about what is becoming a familiar “literary voice” as AI-generated writing appears seemingly everywhere. “And as A.I. writing becomes more ubiquitous, it only underscores the question — what does it mean for creativity, authenticity or simply being human when so many people prefer to delve into the bizarre prose of the machine?”
The 2025 PW Salary and Jobs Report, an annual survey of publishing professionals conducted by Publishers Weekly, offers a snapshot of the demographics, job satisfaction, salary, and feelings about artificial intelligence among those working in publishing. Among the findings from the 726 respondents: 76 percent identified as white, down from 80 percent last year; most are generally happy with their chosen profession, median pay rose rose $5,000 last year, to $80,000; and 63 percent said their companies use AI. “But the more familiar people become with the technology, the less they seem to like it.”
Oxford University Press has revealed its Word of the Year, USA Today reports. The term “rage bait,” or online content that is intentionally meant to elicit anger, has tripled in usage over the last year.
For the New Yorker, Brady Brickner-Wood looks at the curious trend of “performative reading,” or treating a book like an accessory and reading in public while most others scroll on their phones and retreat under noise-cancelling headphones. “This way of perceiving social reality—and particularly a person’s reading life—may seem inane, even deranged. But performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books.”
The novelist Daniel Woodrell, celebrated for prose “as rugged and elemental as the igneous rock of the Ozark Mountains,” has died, the New York Times reports. Best known for his 2006 novel Winter’s Bone, “he was an artist admired by close observers of contemporary fiction as a master storyteller of rural America.”
The Prison and Justice Writing Program at PEN America has launched the Incarcerated Writers Bureau, a digital resource to help make professional and creative opportunities more accessible to writers in U.S. prisons. “The website features information for publishers, literary agents, and journalists seeking to work with incarcerated writers, a searchable roster of featured writers, and a database for publishers and media platforms to submit opportunities for writers working from prison.”
Pepe Montero has been named the new executive director of literary arts center Hugo House, Capitol Hill Seattle reports. The announcement comes nearly two years after Diane Delgado resigned from the position after less than a year on the job. Delgado was Hugo House’s first permanent executive director since Tree Swenson resigned in February 2021.
Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, has hired a new CEO, according to Portland Business Journal. David Maquera takes over from Patrick Bassett who stepped down in September after five years in the position. “The leadership change comes two months after Powell’s laid off employees and secured a $4.5M capital infusion.”
More travelers are drawing inspiration for their trips from their favorite stories and books, USA Today reports. According to the global travel search engine Skyscanner, “55 percent of travelers have booked their trips based on literature, with 14 percent of them wanting to go on a writing or reading retreat and 33 percent hoping to visit a destination mentioned in a book.”
In an essay for the New York Times Magazine, Carlo Rotella, who teaches English courses at Boston College, writes about how some humanities teachers have approached their work using “more purposeful approaches to writing and reading, less reliance on technology and a renewed focus on face-to-face community.” According to Rotella, an English class that resists AI has three main elements: “pen-and-paper and oral testing; teaching the process of writing rather than just assigning papers; and greater emphasis on what happens in the classroom.”
James Patterson and Bookshop.org have partnered to launch a new literary award called the James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize, Shelf Awareness reports. A grand prize of $15,000 will go to a debut author chosen by independent booksellers; a runner-up will receive $10,000. Full-length debut books originally written in English and first published in the U.S. between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2025, are eligible for the prize. “Indie booksellers from qualifying bookstores will be able to nominate titles and vote for the longlist, shortlist, and final winners. Nominations will open on January 5, 2026, with the 10-book longlist scheduled to be announced on February 9. The five-book shortlist will be announced on March 16, and the winner on April 6.”
Kelly Jensen of Book Riot examines U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. McConnell’s ruling in favor of twenty-one state attorneys general who sued Donald Trump over the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and several other small federal agencies. “This permanent injunction means that the Trump administration cannot do further harm to the IMLS.”
The latest episode of the New York Times Book Review podcast, hosted by MJ Franklin, looks at the year’s big book awards and what they “might tell us about the state of literature in 2025.”
A new partnership between the Black List and Blackstone Publishing called the Blackstone Publishing Novel Initiative aims to identify an unpublished manuscript to enter into a $25,000 publishing deal. “The Black List will assist Blackstone Publishing in identifying a shortlist of outstanding manuscripts through a submission period on blcklst.com from November 20, 2025 until June 9, 2026.” In order to be eligible, however, writers are requited to pay at least $180 in fees.
Chris Hewitt of the Minnesota Star Tribune writes about the practice and process of asking fellow authors for prepublication praise, or blurbs. “The idea behind blurbs is that if a beloved writer likes a book (assuming they have read it), maybe you will, too. But that’s not a universal belief.”
Catapult Books has acquired Portland, Oregon–based Hawthorne Books, Publishers Weekly reports. “Under the agreement, Catapult has acquired Hawthorne’s catalog of about 50 titles and the Hawthorne trademark.” Founded in 2001 by Rhonda Hughes, Hawthorne becomes Catapult’s fourth imprint alongside Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull Press. “Hughes will stay on as contributing editor for Hawthorne Books and report to group editorial director Dan Smetanka. The first new titles acquired by Hughes are expected to be released in fall 2026.”
A Missouri state law that “criminalized public and private school teachers and librarians for providing students books with what the state considered ‘sexually explicit material,’” has been overturned by a Missouri Circuit Court, Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch reports. Under the law, which was enacted in 2022, hundreds of books were removed from school libraries. “School staff members who were in violation could be fined $2,000 or jailed for up to a year.”
“More than half of published novelists in the UK believe artificial intelligence could eventually replace their work entirely, according to a new report from the University of Cambridge,” the Guardian reports. The study, conducted for the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, surveyed 258 published novelists and 74 publishing professionals. “Just over half (51 percent) of novelists said that AI is likely to end up entirely replacing their work.”
Elizabeth A. Harris of the New York Times takes a look at the award-winning books from last night’s National Book Award ceremony.
The 76th National Book Awards winners were announced this evening at the 2025 ceremony. David Bowles presented the award in Young People’s Literature to Daniel Nayeri, author of The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story; Stesha Brandon presented the award in Translated Literature to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and translator Robin Myers for We Are Green and Trembling; Terrance Hayes presented the award in Poetry to Patricia Smith, author of The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems; Raj Patel presented the award in Nonfiction to Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; and Rumaan Alam presented the award in Fiction to Rabih Alameddine, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). Roxane Gay and George Saunders received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, respectively.
Two books that had been submitted to one of New Zealand’s largest literary competitions were disqualified “because the covers had violated the contest’s new rule about A.I.-generated material,” according to the New York Times. The publisher of both books, Quentin Wilson, “said in an e-mail on Tuesday that the episode was ‘heartbreaking’ for the two authors, who do not use A.I. in their writing, and upsetting for the production and design teams that worked hard on the books. He added that the rapid rise of A.I. has put the publishing industry in ‘uncharted waters.’”
Copies of Sarah Ferguson’s forthcoming children’s book, set to be published on Thursday, have been withdrawn from sale and pulped “in the wake of the renewed scrutiny over her links to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” the Guardian reports. Flora and Fern: Kindness Along the Way has also disappeared from the publisher’s website as well as those of online retailers. Earlier this month Ferguson lost the title Sarah, Duchess of York after King Charles stripped Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his remaining titles.
The American Library Association has announced the six books shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The novels are A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf) by Megha Majumdar; The Unworthy (Scribner) by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses; and We Do Not Part (Hogarth) by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The nonfiction books are Baldwin, Styron, and Me (Biblioasis) by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc; There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown) by Brian Goldstone; and Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG) by Yiyun Li. The two medal winners will be announced on Tuesday, January 27.
Spotify has launched audiobook programs in its home country of Sweden as well as Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, Publishers Weekly reports. “The catalog has 300,000 titles, including over 60,000 local-language titles: more than 29,000 in Danish, over 25,000 in Swedish, and over 19,000 in Finnish.”
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the winner of the 2025 Giller Prize for her novel, Pick a Color, published by Knopf in Canada and Little, Brown in the United States. She received $100,000 Canadian (approximately $71,375). The finalists, each of whom will receive $10,000 Canadian, are Mona Awad for We Love You, Bunny, Eddy Boudel Tan for The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, Emma Donoghue for The Paris Express, and Emma Knight for The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
Publishers Weekly looks at various organizations working to ensure that people who are incarcerated have access to literature, including Chicago’s Books to Prisoners and Seattle’s Books Not Bars. “In 2024, some 27,500 pounds of books went out to prisons in more than 40 states, with the help of local groups that know the rules of individual states and institutions.”
Sourcebooks is now the fifth largest publisher in the country when considering print units sold, “breaking the longstanding Big Five, and pushing Macmillan into sixth place, according to publishers’ internal analysis of data from Circana Bookscan,” according to Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch. “While Macmillan is still considerably larger overall, with far higher e-book unit sales and an established, successful audiobook division, this is the first time an independently-run house has challenged the dominance of the same set of big publishing conglomerates since Bookscan began.”
Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute, announced the 2026 longlist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, a $35,000 award for a work of fiction that “illuminates a vital contemporary issue.” The longlist is True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press) by Rabih Alameddine, King of Ashes (Flatiron Books) by S.A. Cosby, The Wilderness (Mariner Books) by Angela Flournoy, Culpability (Spiegel & Grau) by Bruce Holsinger, Intemperance (HarperVia) by Sonora Jha, The River Is Waiting (Marysue Rucci Books) by Wally Lamb, Ring (Bancroft Press) by Michelle Lerner, A Family Matter (Scribner) by Claire Lynch, Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books) by Charlotte McConaghy, These Heathens (Random House) by Mia McKenzie, Happy Land (Berkley) by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, This Here Is Love (Norton) by Princess Joy L. Perry, Endling (Doubleday) by Maria Reva, Behind the Waterline (Blair) by Kionna Walker LeMalle, and So Far Gone (Harper) by Jess Walter. The shortlist will be announced March 11, 2026; the winner will be revealed April 23, 2026.
