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THE CASTAWAYS, adapted from Lucy Clarke's bestselling book, is making its way to Channel 5, having originally aired on Paramount+ back in 2023. The series follows a woman, Erin, whose sister Lori goes missing while travelling abroad. She travels to Fiji to investigate the use of her missing sister's credit card following suspicious activity on a remote Pacific island. The Guardian described the series as "A darkly plotted and sunnily staged piece of escapism". The series stars Sheridan Smith as Lori Holme and Celine Buckens as Erin Holme. The Standard review reads: "Clarke’s deliciously intriguing plot is aided by a standout performance from the intensely likeable Smith, who propels the drama along. Lincolnshire-born Sheridan is known for her roles in The Royle Family, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Gavin & Stacey and Benidorm. Celine Buckens, a 28-year-old Belgian-British actress, is known for her roles in Free Rein, Showtrial and Warrior. The series also stars Brendan Cowell as Mike Brass, Lasarus Ratuere as Felix Vatuba, Dominic Tighe as Daniel Eldridge and Charlotte Vega as Amber Gordon. The Castaways airs on Channel 5 on Sunday, January 26 at 9pm. The remaining episodes will air on consecutive days, from Monday, January 27.

ENGLAND IS MINE by Nicolas Padamsee has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2025! The Gordon Burn Prize recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution, often playing with style, pushing boundaries, crossing genres or challenging readers’ expectations. Founded in 2012 by New Writing North, Faber & Faber and the Gordon Burn Trust, the Gordon Burn Prize has built a reputation for identifying and celebrating brilliant books that often find their readers outside the mainstream. The 2025 prize will be awarded in March 2025 in Gordon Burn’s home city, Newcastle upon Tyne, with support from Newcastle University and NCLA, the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. The prize remembers the writer Gordon Burn who died in 2009, seeking to celebrate those who follow in his footsteps. A journalist and author of ten books, Burn’s work includes the novels Alma Cogan and Fullalove and non-fiction titles Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker and Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West. Like Gordon Burn’s own work, the prize is open to a diverse range of themes and perspectives drawn from the breadth of today’s cultural and social concerns. The judges seek work that shows an affinity with the spirit and sensibility of Gordon’s literary methods: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; writers of non-fiction brave enough to recast characters and historical events to create a new and vivid reality. The shortlist will be announced in January and the winner will be announced at the Live Theatre on 6 March 2025.

LEVITATION FOR BEGINNERS by Suzannah Dunn has been shortlisted for the 2024 Nero Book Award for Fiction. The Nero Book Awards are the only set of multi-category awards open exclusively to writers based in the UK and Ireland and have established themselves as ‘one of Britain and Ireland’s top literary prizes’ (The Observer), propelling the inaugural Nero Book Awards Gold Prize winner 2023, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton), to a wider audience earlier this year. The book’s paperback edition jumped from #3,724 to #129 in the Amazon book charts the morning after the announcement. Simon Prosser, Publishing Director at Hamish Hamilton, said: “Winning the Gold Prize was a great extra boost for The Bee Sting as we prepared to launch our paperback edition, and we were delighted when the book went straight into the Top 5 of the Sunday Times paperback fiction bestseller chart.” The category judges have selected 16 books as the best of the year in the four categories out of hundreds of books submitted. Each category (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Debut Fiction and Children’s) winner, chosen from the shortlist, will be announced on Tuesday 14th January 2025 and of those, one book will be selected as the overall winner – The Nero Gold Prize, Book of the Year – by a final panel of judges and announced at a ceremony on 5th March 2025. 10 out of 16 shortlisted books are by women and more than half of the books shortlisted are by debut authors. There is also an even split of books published by major publishing houses and independent presses represented on the shortlist this year. The judges for the 2024 Fiction Prize were Kevin Power, Dr Will Smith and Zoe West.

THE WOMAN ON THE LEDGE by Ruth Mancini (Century, 2024) has made it to number 3 on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List.

NEON ROSES by Rachel Dawson has been shortlisted for the 2024 Polari Frist Book Prize. The Polari Prize is the UK and Ireland’s only dedicated LGBTQ+ book prize, founded by author and activist, Paul Burston. The Polari First Book Prize was launched in 2011. Previous winners include Fiona Mozley, Saleem Haddad, Paul McVeigh, Kirsty Logan, Diriye Osman, John McCullough, Mari Hannah, James Maker, Angela Chadwick, Amrou Al-Kadhi, Mohsin Zaidi, Adam Zmith and Jon Ransom. The Polari Prize was founded in 2019 and awarded to Andrew McMillan in its inaugural year, to Kate Davies in 2020, Diana Souhami in 2021, Joelle Taylor in 2022 and Julia Armfield in 2023. The Children’s & YA Book Prize was established in 2022 and won by Terry Eagleton and James Mayhew. The awards have been covered in a wide range of publications including Metro, the Bookseller, Book Brunch, the Guardian, the i, Irish Independent, Press Association, Gay Times, Winq, BBC Radio 4, The London Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. This year's judges for the Polari First Book Prize are author Rachel Holmes, author and writing coach Karen McLeod, author Jon Ransom (Polari Prize winner 2023), Co-chair of Spread The Word Simon Richardson and author Paul Burston (chair). Jon Ransom said: “This is an exciting and diverse longlist, representing the very best of LGBTQ+ writing today.”

THE WOMAN ON THE LEDGE by Ruth Mancini has been chosen as one of six titles on the Richard & Judy Book Club. The six books in this brand new WHSmith Book Club selection include compulsive thrillers and twisty mysteries selected by Richard & Judy themselves.

Ella Frears's debut novel GOODLORD: AN EMAIL has been shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Petry 2024. The Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland, honouring fresh voices alongside internationally established names. First awarded in 1992, over the last three decades the prizes have celebrated some of the most recognised names in poetry including Simon Armitage, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Claudia Rankine, Jackie Kay and Caleb Femi.

On Thursday 13th June 2024, Roy Foster, Chair of Judges, announced that MONET: THE RESTLESS VISION, published by Allen Lane, had won the ELHB 2024 Prize. Flora Fraser, Chair of the Prize, presented winning author Jackie Wullschläger with a cheque for £5,000 and a bound copy of Elizabeth Longford’s memoir, The Pebbled Shore. The Judges are all well-known historical biographers and historians. Antonia and Flora Fraser are also, respectively, daughter and granddaughter of Elizabeth Longford, the distinguished historical biographer and author of Victoria: RI, of Wellington: Years of the Sword and of Wellington: Pillar of State, who died at the age of 96 in 2002. Roy Foster on Jackie Wullschläger’s winning biography, Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane):"The Judges cast a wide net for the 2024 Prize, choosing books which profiled various kinds of transformative lives: people who crossed barriers to change history, often in ways no less decisive for being discreet, whether they were philosophers, codebreakers, politicians or diplomats. In the end we chose a masterly biography of an artist who transformed the way we see things. Jackie Wullschläger’s life of Claude Monet is not only an enthralling portrait of a powerful personality; she shows how the ‘restlessness’ pinpointed in her subtitle drove Monet to reformulate memory and time in his great serial paintings. The process culminated with the legendary water-lilies series, but Wullschläger’s deeply-researched book traces the development of his vision back to its origins. She surveys and illuminates a complex and passionate personal life, and the networks of friendship and affinity which connected him to the worlds of Clemenceau, Bergson and Proust, as well as the fellowship of other Impressionists. Her biography not only shows the development of a revolutionary artistic vision and the slow process of understanding it; she sets the process against a brilliant evocation of the rich and multi-layered world of French culture in the late nineteenth century and belle époque. Historically insightful, psychologically perceptive, and consummately readable, Monet: The Restless Vision fulfilled everything the Judges of the Elizabeth Longford Prize look for in ground-breaking historical biography." Founded in 2003 by Flora Fraser and Peter Soros (Patron) to commemorate her late grandmother’s writing career, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography rewards annually a historical biography which combines scholarship and narrative drive. Previous winners include Anne Somerset’s Queen Anne, John Bew’s Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, Giles Tremlett’s Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen and Ramachandra Guha’s Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom.

NEON ROSES by Rachel Dawson has been shortlisted for The Society of Authors Betty Trask Prize. This award is presented for a first novel by a writer under 35. Judge Anjali Joseph said: "The shortlist this year includes several historical novels, and a few that take elements of classics – Moby Dick, Frankenstein – and make them into something new. All of the shortlisted novels delighted us with their freshness and each had a voice that was distinctively and recognisably its own." Judged by Anjali Joseph, Michael Donkor and Alex Preston.

Faber will reissue P. D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh mystery series, in groups of five books at a time in August and November 2024, and February 2025. The covers for the new editions are designed by Robbie Porter and described by the publisher as the “perfect reintroduction to a legend”. Publication will be supported by a wide-reaching marketing and publicity campaign, with contemporary authors discussing P D James’ work and legacy over the next year, starting at CrimeFest, where she was the “Ghost of Honour”. “P. D. James sets the standard for modern crime writing,” said Faber’s crime editor, Sara Helen Binney. “Every time I go back to the Adam Dalgliesh series I find something new, and it’s the honour of my career to work with the wildly talented team here to reissue these 14 novels as the classics they are.” "P. D. James took the classic crime novel and turned up the dial. The murders Dalgliesh investigates provide complex, arresting narratives, but it is James’ probing of the institutions in which they occur that makes her work of lasting significance." - MICK HERRON

CLARA AND OLIVIA by Lucy Ashe has been shortlisted for The Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger Award! This award is for the best historical crime novel, first published in the UK in English during the judging period, set in any period up to 50 years prior to the year in which the award will be made. For novels that involve passages set later than this time period, at least three quarters of the book should be set in an earlier period.

NEON ROSES by Rachel Dawson has been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award for English Language Fiction. Each year, the Wales Book of the Year Award celebrates talented Welsh writers who excel in diverse literary forms in both Welsh and English. There are four categories in both languages – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction and Children and Young People, with one of the category winners going on to win the Overall Award and claiming the title, Wales Book of the Year. Leusa Llewelyn, Artistic Director of Literature Wales, said: “What a feast the shortlists selected by this year’s judges present. Twenty-four books by experienced and new writers, each presenting a different aspect on Welsh literature. It is impossible to summarize so many books, and so many authors – I would encourage you to read them all, each and every one! Congratulations to all the shortlisted writers for your achievement and for entertaining us. We look forward to seeing you all at the Wales Book of the Year Award Ceremony at the Galeri, Caernarfon in July.” NEON ROSES is one of three shortlisted books for The Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award.

From Antony Topping, CJ Sansom's agent: "It is with enormous sadness that we announce the death of CJ Sansom, a writer it has been our privilege to represent since publication of his first novel, DISSOLUTION, more than twenty years ago. Chris was first introduced to the agency by another of our authors, herself a legend in crime fiction, PD James. Chris had sent some early chapters of DISSOLUTION to PD James who picked up on his talent and posted the chapters to us. If I remember correctly she wrote a cover note saying something characteristically understated like “I think there might be something here…”, and she wasn’t wrong. DISSOLUTION introduced us to Chris’ most famous protagonist, Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake, and, following DISSOLUTION in the same series, Chris went on to write the international bestsellers DARK FIRE, SOVEREIGN, REVELATION, HEARTSTONE, LAMENTATION, and TOMBLAND and also the standalone thrillers, equally successful, WINTER IN MADRID and DOMINION. Chris did not seek the limelight, preferring to be known through his novels, and so in comparison with his fame and reputation relatively few people were lucky enough to know the person behind the work. He had an immense, far-reaching and deeply humane intelligence. His fans can see this in the novels but he applied it equally in his everyday dealings with friends, his politics and his charitable acts. He had a loathing of injustice of any kind and a special contempt for bullies. At the same time he had a joyful and piercing sense of humour which he would spring on you, with an attempt at a straight face, when you were least expecting it. I already cherish the memories of my visits to his house where we would discuss his latest novel-in-progress – but also the latest HBO series, the latest harmful nonsense emanating from the Government, the latest geopolitical breezes coming our way from abroad which Chris always analysed with the long and sure eye of a world-class historian – but I think I will remember best the laughter we enjoyed together. It is an extraordinarily strange coincidence that Chris has died only a handful of days before a new generation of fans will meet Matthew Shardlake, Barak and Guy and co. for the first time through the Disney+ adaptation of DISSOLUTION which is being released on Wednesday of this week. This is also a moment for which Chris’ established fans have been waiting a long time. Chris was so proud of all the work and determination that went into bringing the novels to our television screens, which I hope will bring an entirely new audience to the books and which will maybe also inspire some old fans to return to their favourite CJ Sansom novels. So long, Chris. We were lucky to know you.”

After announcing the series last year, Disney+ has released the first official trailer for SHARDLAKE, based on C. J. Sansom's best-selling Tudor murder mystery novels. The four-part series, produced out of the UK, stars Arthur Hughes as an unlikely detective tasked with uncovering a murder at a 16th century monastery. It comes from Banijay-owned producer The Forge and Runaway Fridge. The trailer opens with Hughes (Then Barbara Met Alan) as the titular Shardlake, saying “Why, in this house of God, do I smell secrets and fear?” as the camera pans in on a dark monastery near the British coast. Bells ring ominously and dark music plays as its revealed there has been a murder that he must solve. Shardlake is a lawyer with an acute sense of justice and one of the few honest men in a world beset with scheming and plots, charged by Henry VIII’s powerful ally Thomas Cromwell (Sean Bean) to investigate the murder of one of his commissioners at a monastery in the remote town of Scarnsea. With Crowell’s political survival hanging on him solving the case, Cromwell leaves him in no doubt failure is not an option and orders the cocky Jack Barak (Anthony Doyle) to accompany Shardlake, whose is cruelly known as “crookback” due to his condition as a person living with scoliosis. The series also stars Babou Ceesay as Abbot Fabian, Paul Kaye as Brother Jerome, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis as Alice, Peter Firth as Norfolk, Matthew Steer as Goodhap, Brian Vernel as Brother Mortimus, Irfan Shamji as Brother Guy, David Pearse as Brother Edwig, Miles Barrow as Brother Gabriel, Mike Noble as Bugge and Kimberley Nixon as Joan. Watch the trailer here.