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14 authors from 12 countries have made it on to Judges’ List of the Man Booker Prize 2009, with seven of the authors being writers in translation. You can find the list here. On the other hand, American authors dominated the longlist of the Orange fiction award.

The shortlist for the 2009 Arthur C Clarke Award was also announced this week, consisting of six works, with the early frontrunner being the Neal Stephenson for Anathem.

Irish poet Seamus Heaney was awarded the £40,000 David Cohen prize in recognition of the "sheer scale" of his literary achievements....

The New York Review of Books carried an excerpt from J.M. Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, to be published in January 2008 while The Independent carried an exclusive extract of "Mere Anarchy" by Woody Allen.

The storySouth 2007 Million Writers Award for Fiction for best online short story was judged as "Urchins, While Swimming" by Catherynne M. Valente. Paolo Coelho's most famous work "The Alchemist" is heading for the big screen, with Laurence Fishburne directing the effort. July issue of Words Without Borders is out. Gunter Grass meets the...

Booker of Bookers author and staunch secularist Salman Rushdie was knighted by the Queen of England.

Stephen Hawking is said to be writing a children's book, while Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles is reported to have cast a "international roster of stars" for the screen adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago's novel Blindness.

Latest issue of Book Forums is out, featuring among other, a writers' list of their favorite book-to-film adaptations. Latest issue of Words Without Borders has also been released. J.K. Rowling will give a reading from Harry Potter and the...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wins 2007 Orange Prize for her book "Half of a Yellow Sun" while Karen Connelly gets the New Writer award for The Lizard Cage.

Antoine saw me driving around in that car, with my bad keyboard-player from the Cure hair and, 20 years later, give or take, rePsih8u_2membered it and put it in his book. Now that, my friends, is fucking weird.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez at last journeys home, while Iain Banks is interviewed on topics ranging from politics to SF (of course!).

"I wouldn't move to the United States now...

Tom Wayne of Prospero's Books started a storm by creating a bonfire of second hand books because he didn't have place to store them and other thrift shops and libraries could not take them in since they were also full.

Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.

Sorted Books project looks...

We at LitPundit are sorry for the lack of updates in the last month or so. We are back, albeit a bit slow for now, but things will be back to normal around here soon.

Royal Society Prize for Science Books shortlist for 2007 has been released. Read the BBC article here .

The National Book Critics Circle's has started a campaign to save book reviews

Over the past five years, one by one, newspapers have begun to forsake books and their readers. While book review sections at the Washington Post and the New York Times continue strongly, many other newspapers have begun packing up and winnowing down their book coverage.

Issue 3 of Rudy Rucker's SF webzine Flurb has been published. Guardian has an article by Gwyneth Jones on how SF scenarios and...

Los Angeles Times overhauls the book review section. Read the Editor's Note.

Steve Mitchelmore is not too impressed with Daniel Kehlmann's "Measuring the World" nor with the reviews that the book is getting. SciFi Weekly interviews Michael Flynn, author of the Hugo-nominated Eifelheim.

On the prizes side of things, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007 and the Orange shorlist was announced and so was the 2007 Hugo Award finalists list.

The Millions notes that The Paris Review has published some work...

Kurt Vonnegut died on 11th April at the age of 84. Coverage, as expected, in several media outlets including New York Times (1), New York Times (2), Forbes, LA Times, Salon and others. Watch a 8-part documentary on Vonnegut and his work, compiled by SF Signal. kimbofo notices that soon after the news of the death was announced, Vonnegut's books climbed to the "Movers and Shakers" list at Amazon.

On this occassion, some relavant links from the past - The Paris Review interview with Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike on Vonnegut...

The round-up is being posted a bit early this week in view of the long holiday weekend.

James Tiptree Awards, 2006 winners have been announced. The winners are Shelley Jackson for "Half Life" and Catherynne M. Valente for "The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden".

Harper has made available 157 years of its archive online for subscribers as scanned PDFs. $16.97 a year print subscription just got more enticing!

Darkermatter has a 1979 interview with Douglas Adams, who as then just 27. Phantastik Couch interviews Neil Gaiman, The Elegant Variations interviews Chris Abani and Tehelka interviews Mohsin...