Fox News may have abandoned Bill O’Reilly, but the beleaguered TV host, who was sacked on Wednesday following sexual harassment claims, has found support from his publisher Henry Holt, which has promised to stand by the bestselling author.

In a statement issued after O’Reilly’s sacking, the Macmillan-owned imprint said it would continue to publish books by the scandal-hit conservative political commentator. Asked by US trade magazine Publishers Weekly if it would still publish an as yet untitled book from O’Reilly and co-writer Martin Dugard lined up for release in September 2017, the imprint said: “Our plans have not changed.”

The broadcaster was sacked suddenly after advertisers boycotted his top-rated The O’Reilly Factor show after it emerged the broadcaster had settled a series of sexual harassment claims, reported to be worth $13m (£10m), with five women, and that the ch3annel was investigating further allegations. As women’s groups called for O’Reilly to be sacked and 50 advertisers abandoned the show, 21st Century Fox, which owns the populist news channel, announced: “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel.”

Earlier in April, US president Donald Trump, who is friends with O’Reilly, came to his defence. “I think he’s a person I know well – he is a good person,” Trump told the New York Times. “I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally I think he shouldn’t have settled. Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

Despite the scandal, sales of his most recent book have not suffered. According to Publishers Weekly, Old School: Life in the Sane Lane – a rallying cry against “political correctness” and in favour of so-called traditional American values written with Bruce Feirstein – sold more than 67,000 copies in its first week of sale in late March, and has now sold almost 109,000 copies.

As well as homespun political commentary, the 67-year-old has co-written a series of history books with Dugard. Under the series title Killing, the books have sold more than 15m copies worldwide. The most recent, Killing the Rising Sun, which is about the decision to drop atom bombs on Japan in 1945, has sold more than 1m copies.

There are concerns in some circles that Henry Holt will face a backlash over its decision to stand by O’Reilly. It is not the first time the author has found himself at the centre of a scandal. In his 2013 bestseller Killing Kennedy, O’Reilly claimed he had knocked on the door of George de Mohrenschildt, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, just before he killed himself inside the house – a claim since challenged. His account of his experiences covering the Falklands war has also been disputed.

A clue to how O’Reilly will handle the scandal might be found in one line from Old School. “Rather than major in whining, old school folks tough it out, developing skills to overcome the inevitable obstacles every human being faces,” he writes.

A new library at Lambeth Palace will house the biggest collection of religious works outside the Vatican after planning permission was granted for the first new building at the historic site for 200 years.

A contemporary building with a nine-storey tower will be constructed in the grounds of the palace on the south bank of the Thames opposite the Palace of Westminster.

The collection of historic manuscripts and books dating back to the ninth century will be stored in highly advanced archives.

“It includes books and manuscripts collected by archbishops down the centuries, and the modern collection is the archive of the Church of England,” said Declan Kelly, director of libraries and archives at Lambeth Palace.

“There are maps and books, even a book on mathematics written by one archbishop. It covers periods of great religious turmoil across Europe and really important parts of this country’s history.”

The only surviving copy of the execution warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots by Elizabeth I in 1587; the licence for the poet John Milton’s third marriage in 1663; and a “beautiful exchange of letters” between Prince Albert (who would become King George VI) and the then archbishop about his marriage to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923 were in the collection, Kelly said.

It also includes church representations over the tightening grip of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s, and the lobbying by C of E figures over the 1944 Education Act.

“It covers social and political history. It’s much, much more than a religious archive,” Kelly added.

The brick building will stand at the far end of the grounds to the Grade 1-listed palace, the London seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

Wright & Wright, the firm of architects which won a competitive process to design the library, said the narrow building would form an “occupied wall”, protecting both the collection and the gardens it overlooked.

“This is an extraordinarily important and unique collection,” said partner Clare Wright. “It’s a fantastic honour to be working on such a significant building.”

It will have views over the palace gardens and across the Thames to the Houses of Parliament. “It’s a wonderful architectural opportunity to create a building about church and state and the evolution of British democracy,” said Wright.

It was designed to have an “incredibly small carbon footprint, which is quite difficult when you also need to protect such an important collection”, she added.

Construction of the library, which will be open to the public, will start early next year and is expected to be completed in 2020. Lambeth Palace declined to be drawn on the budget for the project, but said the costs would be met by the church commissioners who are the custodians of the collection.

Heather Rose has won the 2017 Stella prize for Australian women writers for her novel, The Museum of Modern Love, based on the artwork of Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramović.

“It’s by far the biggest thing that’s ever happened in my career,” Rose told Guardian Australia.

Winning the $50,000 prize, which was established in 2013 to support and celebrate Australian women’s writing, was “extraordinary” but also came with responsibility, said Rose. “I have had the great luxury of labouring in relative obscurity for a long time, and that has allowed me to explore my strange novels with a great deal of freedom.”

She said receiving a financial reward for her book, which took 11 years to write, was gratifying, but “more than that, the sense of encouragement that an acknowledgement like this gives me is unprecedented for me”.

Society underestimates how much harder writing is for women, Rose said, whose previous novels include The River Wife (2009) and The Butterfly Man (2005). “It’s incredibly difficult as a mother and as a woman to find that solitary thinking time ... I think men and women equally work incredibly hard at their books, but I think that there’s more demanded of a woman’s time generally than there is of a man’s.

“All artists need to learn a certain amount of selfishness in order to be able to do their work.”

All writers shortlisted for this year’s Stella prize received $3,000 and a three-week writing retreat at Point Addis in Victoria. The shortlisted writers included Emily Maguire (An Isolated Incident), Catherine de Saint Phalle (Poum and Alexandre) and Maxine Beneba Clarke (The Hate Race), alongside two posthumous accolades for Georgia Blain (Between a Wolf and a Dog) and Cory Taylor (Dying: A Memoir).

The Museum of Modern Love is Rose’s reimagining of Abramović’s 2010 performance of The Artist is Present, in which the artist sat at a table in the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York in silence every day for three months, inviting members of the public to sit opposite her and exchange meditative gazes.

While Abramović and her work is the axis on which the novel turns, the narrative drive comes from the stories of people who come to participate in the performance, often at a crossroads in their own lives.

Rose has met Abramović in person only once, although she participated in the 2010 performance four times. Rose sought and received permission from the artist to include her as a character in the novel, and interviewed many of the audience members who had participated in or watched the performance at Moma.

Abramović reportedly was very pleased with the final novel.

Brenda Walker, chair of the 2017 prize judging panel, which also included Delia Falconer, Diana Johnston, Sandra Phillips and Benjamin Law, said of The Museum of Modern Love: “It is rare to encounter a novel with such powerful characterisation, such a deep understanding of the consequences of personal and national history, such affection for a city and people who are drawn to it, and such dazzling and subtle explorations of the importance of art in everyday life.”

Rose had originally envisaged writing about an artist inspired by Abramović, but sitting with Abramović during the 2010 performance fundamentally changed the basis of the book.

“I knew when I sat with her that I could no longer do a fictionalised version of her, she had to be herself,” Rose said. “Because the sitting with her was so strange and so otherworldly, but also so terribly secular, that I thought there’s no way I can ever tell the power of this woman’s story by fictionalising her.”

Rose’s early research for the novel involved diving through the boxes of books that would later become curator David Walsh’s library at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). When Mona was built, Walsh gave Rose her own research space adjacent to the library to support her writing, even reading and giving feedback on an early draft of the novel.

“It was a very insistent story,” said Rose. “It wouldn’t leave me alone. And I had to learn to be a better writer to write it. It took everything.”

India is set to make its most expensive film ever with an 1,000 crore rupees (£120m) adaptation of epic Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata.

Entitled Randamoozham, the two-part film will be financed by United Arab Emirates-based billionaire BR Shetty, and will dwarf the budget of the current record-holder, the two-part epic Baahubali, which cost a combined Rs430 crore (£51m) to make.

Randamoozham is adapted from the novel of the same name by acclaimed Malayalam author and screenwriter MT Vasudevan Nair. The novel reinterprets the Mahabharata from the perspective of the second Pandava prince Bhima. Veteran actor Mohanlal will star as Bhima, while Vasudevan Nair will write the screenplay for the film, which will be shot in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.

“The Mahabharata is an epic of all epics,” Shetty said in a statement. “I believe that this film will not only set global benchmarks, but also reposition India and its prowess in mythological storytelling. I am confident that this film will be adapted in over 100 languages and reach over 3 billion people across the world.”

Randamoozham will be directed by former ad-man VA Shrikumar Menon, who told the New India Express that the film would feature Oscar-winning talents. “We are negotiating with the best talents in the world. We aim to make a global film,” he said.

The Mahabharata has been adapted for film and TV several times before. Hindi, Telugu and Tamil versions have appeared on the large and small screen over the years, while acclaimed theatre director Peter Brook famously produced a nine-hour English-language version of the poem in 1985, later adapted into a TV mini-series. Brook returned to the Mahabharata last year with a new adaptation entitled Battlefield.

Filming for Randamoozham is expected to begin in September next year. The first part of the series is set to reach cinemas in early 2020, with the second part appearing soon after.

Jude Law will take on the role of the young Dumbledore in a sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

The Oscar-winning star, most recently seen in Paolo Sorrentino’s small screen drama The Young Pope, will follow in the footsteps of Richard Harris and Michael Gambon, who inhabited older versions of the character in the Harry Potter franchise.

Author JK Rowling revealed in 2007 that the character is gay but it’s unclear as to whether his sexuality will be an element of the forthcoming film. This year has already seen LGBT characters in two blockbusters: Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast and the Power Rangers reboot.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, an adaptation of the Harry Potter spin-off, was a big box office hit in 2016, making over $800m worldwide. Rowling revealed that the new franchise would total five films.

The second will be directed by David Yates, who was also behind the first, and Law will join Johnny Depp who will reprise his villainous character Gellert Grindelwald.

“Jude Law is a phenomenally talented actor whose work I have long admired, and I’m looking forward to finally having the opportunity to work with him,” Yates said in a statement. “I know he will brilliantly capture all the unexpected facets of Albus Dumbledore as JK Rowling reveals this very different time in his life.”

In the Potter films, we see Dumbledore as the headmaster of Hogwarts yet in the prequels, he will be seen as the transfiguration professor. Law will next be seen in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur adventure and opposite Rooney Mara is music drama Vox Lux.

A seven-year-old Syrian refugee whose tweets from war-torn Aleppo won her a global following is set to write a book. Bana Alabed’s Dear World will recount her experiences in Syria and how she and her family rebuilt their lives as refugees. Simon & Schuster plans to publish it in the US this autumn.

The self-declared peace activist took to the social media network that made her name to announce the news. “I am happy to announce my book will be published by Simon & Schuster. The world must end all the wars now in every part of the world,” she tweeted to her 368,000 followers.

In a statement issued through her publisher, Bana added: “I hope my book will make the world do something for the children and people of Syria and bring peace to children all over the world who are living in war.”

Bana came to prominence in September 2016 after she began tweeting descriptions of her experiences of siege in the Syrian city. Documenting the impact of hunger, airstrikes and civil war, she caught the imagination of followers with her longing for a peaceful childhood and fear for the safety of herself and her family.

A Harry Potter fan, she received the ebook editions directly from JK Rowling after complaining that she could not get hold of physical copies of the books last November. In December, Rowling took part in a Twitter campaign #WhereisBana to put pressure on authorities to find the Alabed family after Bana’s online presence briefly went dark in December. It was later revealed that the family was being evacuated from Aleppo.

Bana has also used the account to plead for peace to Russian president Vladimir Putin, UK prime minister Theresa May, US president Barack Obama and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. At the end of the year, her family were allowed into Turkey, where they met the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and were given permission to remain.

Likening her to Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who was given refugee status in the UK after being shot in a horrific attack, S&S senior editor Christine Pride said: “Bana’s experiences and message transcend the headlines, and pierce through the political noise and debates, to remind us of the human cost of war and displacement.” The publisher will also launch a young readers’ edition under its Salaam Reads imprint.

Aided by her English-speaking mother Fatemah, the young activist courted controversy in February with a video addressed to US president Donald Trump about the travel ban. In the message, she asked if she now qualified as a terrorist and whether the president had ever gone hungry. However, her opposition to Trump did not extend to his recent airstrikes in Syria, for which she has tweeted her support.

There is no release scheduled for Britain thus far, but Simon & Schuster UK said negotiations were under way.

Faith remains a potent presence at the highest level of UK politics despite a growing proportion of the country’s population defining themselves as non-religious, according to the author of a new book examining the faith of prominent politicians.

Nick Spencer, research director of the Theos thinktank and the lead author of The Mighty and the Almighty: How Political Leaders Do God, uses the example that all but one of Britain’s six prime ministers in the past four decades have been practising Christians to make his point.

The book examines the faith of 24 prominent politicians, mostly in Europe, the US and Australia, since 1979. “The presence and prevalence of Christian leaders, not least in some of the world’s most secular, plural and ‘modern’ countries, remains noteworthy. The idea that ‘secularisation’ would purge politics of religious commitment is surely misguided,” it concludes.

It includes “theo-political biographies” of Theresa May, an Anglican vicar’s daughter who has spoken publicly about her Christianity since taking office last July, and her predecessors David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Only John Major is absent from the post-1979 lineup.

Spencer writes that May is a “politician with strong views rather than a strong ideology, and those views were seemingly shaped by her Christian upbringing and faith. That Christianity gives her, in her own words, ‘a moral backing to what I do, and I would hope that the decisions I take are taken on the basis of my faith’.”

May told Desert Island Discs in 2014 that Christianity had helped to frame her thinking but it was “right that we don’t flaunt these things here in British politics”. According to Spencer, “in this regard at very least, May practises what she preaches”.

However, the prime minister’s apparent reticence did not stop her lambasting Cadbury’s and the National Trust this month over their supposed downgrading of the word Easter in promotional materials and packaging.

Elsewhere, the book looks at five US presidents – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – five European leaders, three Australian prime ministers and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Five leaders from other countries – including Nelson Mandela – complete the list.

The “great secular hope” was that religion would fade out of the political landscape, Spencer writes. But “the last 40 years have turned out somewhat different”, with the emergence of political Islam, the strength of Catholicism in central and south America and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the global south.

Even in the west, “Christian political leaders have hardly become less prominent over recent decades, and may, in fact, have become more so,” he says.

But Spencer told the Guardian: “There is no one size fits all, politically. You don’t find them clustering on the political spectrum.”

At the rightwing end were Thatcher and Reagan. At the other was Fernando Lugo, the president of Paraguay between 2008 and 2012, a prominent Catholic “bishop of the poor”, liberation theologist and part of a wave of leftwing leaders in Latin America.

There were also significant differences in the political contexts in which Christian politicians were operating, Spencer said. “There are places where you stand to make a lot of political capital by talking about your faith – such as the US or Russia.

“But in countries like the UK, Australia, Germany, France, where electorates are hyper-sceptical, politicians stand to lose political capital. No politician in the UK or France talks about their faith in order to win over the electorate.”

Blair’s communications chief Alastair Campbell famously warned a television interviewer against asking the then prime minister about his faith, saying: “We don’t do God.” He believed the British public was instinctively distrustful of religiously-minded politicians.

After he left Downing Street, Blair spoke of the difficulties of talking about “religious faith in our political system. If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.”

Although Blair’s faith reportedly shaped all his key policy decisions in office, the same was not true of all politicians, said Spencer. “There are some politicians for whom faith has shaped politics, and others for whom you can be more confident that politics are shaping faith. Trump is an example of that,” he said.

According to the chapter on Trump – a late addition to the book – the president “is not known for his interest in theology, the church or religion. His statements about faith, not least his own faith, have been infrequent and vague. And yet, Trump is insistent that he believes in God, loves the Bible and has a good relationship with the church … Simply to dismiss Trump’s faith talk would be to dismiss Trump, and 2016 showed that that is a mistake”.

Leaders’ faith

Theresa May Daughter of an Anglican vicar, the British prime minister goes to church most Sundays and has said her Christian faith is “part of who I am and therefore how I approach things ... [it] helps to frame my thinking and my approach”.

Vladimir Putin The Russian president has increasingly presented himself as a man of serious personal faith, which some suggest is connected to a nationalist agenda. He reportedly prays daily in a small Orthodox chapel next to the presidential office.

Angela Merkel The German chancellor is a serious Christian believer but one whose faith is very private. “I am a member of the evangelical church. I believe in God and religion is also my constant companion, and has been for the whole of my life,” she told an interviewer in 2012.

Fernando Lugo The former president of Paraguay was also a prominent Catholic bishop, a champion of the poor and a leading advocate of liberation theology. He urged “defending the gospel values of truth against so many lies, justice against so much injustice, and peace against so much violence”.

Viktor Orbán A relatively recent convert to faith, the Hungarian prime minister frequently invokes the need to defend “Christian Europe” against Muslim migrants. “Christianity is not only a religion, but is also a culture on which we have built a whole civilisation,” he said in 2014.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf The president of Liberia and a Nobel peace laureate, Sirleaf was brought up in a devout family and has frequently appealed for “God’s help and guidance” during her 10 years as head of state. In a 2010 speech, she described religion and spirituality as “the cornerstone of hope, faith and love for all peoples and races”.