A “searing, magnificent” depiction of a gay relationship during the bloody founding of modern America, described by judges as “one of the most wonderful depictions of love in the whole of fiction”, has won the Costa book of the year award.

Sebastian Barry won the £30,000 prize for his novel Days Without End, making him the first novelist to win the prize for a second time. He previously won the Costa book of the year, regarded as one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards, for his novel The Secret Scripture in 2008.

After being named the winner at a central London ceremony, Barry thanked the judges, saying: “You have made me crazy happy from the top of my head to my toes in a way that is a little bit improper at 61.”

Days Without End, praised in the Guardian as “a work of staggering openness; its startlingly beautiful sentences … so capacious that they are hard to leave behind, its narrative so propulsive that you must move on”, follows the life of Thomas McNulty, a migrant in the 1850s who flees the Irish famine.

Leaving a country behind that is “starved in her stocking feet. And she had no stockings”, McNulty reaches America and embarks on a soldier’s life, first fighting Native Americans and then against armies in the civil war. Barry, who has said he was inspired to write a book containing a gay love story after his son came out, also focuses on McNulty’s romance with fellow soldier John Cole, and their adopted Native American daughter, Winona.

Speaking after receiving the award at a ceremony in London, Barry said he had just spoken to his son Toby on Skype. “That was an award in itself,” he said. “I couldn’t hear anything, technology can’t overcome the great literary buzz.”

Having previously said his children refused to read his books, Barry said that Toby had now read Days Without End, which is dedicated to him. “He said to me, ‘You’re not gay, dad, but you’re an ally. And I like your book.’”

Eight years on since his last Costa win, Barry said he had made no plans for spending the prize money, as he had been warned that no novelist had won twice. “Writers have odd economies. We spend the first 10 or 15 years writing and making nothing, and an event like this simply spring cleans your economy. It actually makes that very complicated person, your accountant, reasonably happy for a little while.”

When asked what he planned next, he said, “I want to go home and sit on the couch with my wife and daughter and wonder: ‘What the hell just happened?’”

In a decision that the chair of the judges, author Kate Williams, said took 90 minutes, Days Without End was picked unanimously by the panel as the winner. “It is brutal, it is terrifying, it moves you to tears, it horrifies – and at the same time, it has these fantastic moments of light and beauty, and of friendship,” Williams said. “It takes you from the highs to the lows of human experience. It is an absolutely magnificent, incredible book.”

Celebrating books across five categories – novel, first novel, children’s fiction, poetry and biography – the Costa awards shortlist four writers in each category, with the winner in each then eligible to win the overall book of the year award.

Speaking to the Guardian when he was first shortlisted for the prize in November, Barry said: “It knocks your socks off every time, even in your 60s. Winning the Costa changed my life. I was able to send my kids to university with that prize. To be at the cadet stage again, that is so exciting.”

Barry is the first novelist to win the overall Costa award twice, placing him beside Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, who both won the overall prize twice for their poetry. The Irish novelist and playwright saw off fellow shortlistees Keggie Carew for her biography Dadland, poet Alice Oswald for her collection Falling Awake, children’s author Brian Conaghan for his book The Bombs That Brought Us Together and the esteemed non-fiction writer Francis Spufford, who won the first novel category for his debut, Golden Hill. Barry had trailed Carew as the favourite to win, with odds of 5-2.

In the light of the world’s renewed and intense focus on American politics, Williams said Barry’s book was remarkably prescient despite being written long before Donald Trump’s election as US president.

“It seems very striking, of course, as we are looking so much to America and thinking so much about America, and about American history and life at the moment, that we have this book about the founding of America and how America was won,” she said.

“Because we know, politically in America, the pioneer spirit, the wild west, the founding fathers – these visions are very important to America. It is very striking, even though it was written some time ago, it seems incredibly prescient now.”

2016 saw an unprecedented number of women shortlisted across the Costa award categories, with 14 competing against six men and an entirely female poetry shortlist for the first time since it began as the Whitbread prize in 1971.

The book of the year award has been won most often by novels – 11 times, since the category was introduced in 1985. The last time a novel won was in 2012, when Hilary Mantel won for Bring Up the Bodies.

Each category prizewinner was decided by a three-person judging panel. The overall winner was agreed by a panel consisting of chair Williams and her fellow judges: authors Nicci Gerrard, TV presenter Graham Norton, journalist Sian Williams, actor Robert Bathurst, literary editor Charlotte Heathcote, author Matthew Dennison, Observer literary critic Kate Kellaway and children’s author Cressida Cowell.

The awards are open only to authors living in the UK and Ireland. This year, 596 entries were whittled down to the five, four-book shortlists.

Former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman and The Humans author Matt Haig have vowed not to return to the US while a travel ban signed by president Donald Trump remains in place. The news came as Manchester-based Comma Press announced that during 2017 it would only publish books in translation by authors from the seven countries named in the executive order.

Blackman led authors’ furious response to the travel ban with a tweet on Saturday night. “Thank you to all those who have invited me to various US lit fests/events, but I won’t be visiting the US any time soon,” she wrote.

Fellow author Philip Pullman, chair of the Society of Authors, expressed solidarity with the Noughts and Crosses author. “I’m fully in sympathy with Malorie’s decision, and I might well decide the same way myself if I had a journey forthcoming,” he said.

Haig, who also wrote the bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive, said he had cancelled a proposed family holiday to the US. Though he described it as a “small gesture”, he added: “It just seems like a lack of solidarity at this present moment to go on holiday there with the ban in place.” Urging fellow writers to “do what they can”, however small, he added: “I think writers, by their nature, can be very good at writing and tweeting about politics, but it doesn’t often translate into action. Now I think everybody feels a need to act.”

At Comma, CEO and publisher Ra Page said it had decided to publish only writers from the countries affected by the ban – Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sudan – in 2018, at an emergency editorial meeting on Monday. “If the only narrative America wants to export right now is the narrative of hate, then we need to look elsewhere. We need to consciously turn our backs on the circus that America is descending into,” he said. “We need to fight this. And make no mistake it will be a fight.”

The not-for-profit press, which specialises in short-form writing, has a number of writers directly affected by the ban, including all 20 contributors to two prose collections. Hassan Blasim, the Iraqi-born writer and broadcaster, is now unable to travel to the US, despite huge success there with his 2014 novel The Iraqi Christ.

Blasim was a firsthand witness to the brutality of Saddam Hussein and the cruelty of border patrols at the entrance to Europe, Page said. He added: “Now he finds himself starting all over again; with a new monstrous demagogue, and a new set of inhumane border policies.” Other authors affected include Atef Abu Saif, Nayrouz Qarmout and Talal Abu Shawish.

Specialist Arabic press Saqi Books, which published Sara Khan’s The Battle for British Islam and a number of other affected authors, announced it will publish a satirical collection called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, this year, with contributions from writers, comedians and cartoonists from around the world. Publisher Lynn Gaspard condemned Trump’s order as “inhumane, dangerous and reckless”.

Many Middle Eastern authors have expressed confusion over whether they can travel to the US, while US-based authors feared deportation if they left the country. “Anoud”, an Iraqi woman now living in New York with family in Mosul, said: ”I haven’t got my green card yet and it is very confusing about what will happen, because we are being given conflicting evidence.”

After contributing a heavily critical piece about Islamic State to the Iraq + 100 anthology, she could face danger if returns to her home country. “Unless [the authorities] give a very clear official statement that only people from x, y and z will be affected or that they will accept exiting visas but not grant new ones, I won’t travel,” she said.

Somali-born author Nadifa Mohamed also expressed concern about the ban. “I still don’t know if British citizens like me, who were born in the banned countries, are allowed into the US,” she said. Citing an incident at Washington DC’s Dulles airport in which a Somali woman and her children were held for 20 hours without food or water, she added: “Instances like that make me very worried, as does the fate of refugees from Dadaab who have been waiting years for resettlement to the US and have planned their whole futures around it.”

Authors urged one another to fight the ban using every means at their disposal. Washington-based Aminatta Forna, issued a rallying cry to writers around the world to speak out. “At the moment, I think the more outside voices of outrage Americans hear the better,” she said. “Those of us who can give voice must do so, for the benefit of those who can’t.”

Two years after Microsoft walked away from digital bookselling, a leak of its latest software has hinted that it may ready to try again.

In what may be a fishing exercise to gauge interest, a dedicated bookselling section features in a leaked build of the software giant’s Windows 10 update for phones.

News that the company may enter digital bookselling was welcomed by publishers, although senior figures said they not been approached to supply titles to the store.

Andrew Franklin, managing director of Profile Books, said: “The more competition in the field, the better.” Literary agent Gordon Wise, who also heads the Association of Authors’ Agents, said: “A lot of business goes through one retailer, so it is always very helpful to have other people taking up a book offering.”

An early look at the new software by MSPowerUser showed a shop window for ebooks that, the website claimed, will be integrated into the Windows Store available across all platforms, including PC and mobile. It would plug a hole in Microsoft’s retail offer, which until now has included films, apps, games and music, but not books. According to Strategy Analytics, Microsoft currently only holds 14% of the tablet market.

Microsoft played down the reports of an imminent entry into the book market and hinted that the leaked content may be little more than a teaser to gauge whether there would be widespread consumer interest.

A spokeswoman told the Guardian: “We regularly test new features, and changes to existing features, to see what resonates well with our fans … stay tuned for more information soon.”

The provisionality of the new offering appeared confirmed by publishers, none of whom had been approached to negotiate terms of supply. These could prove a sticking point if they include demands for free content.

Gordon Wise said that any enthusiasm felt by publishers would quickly die if Microsoft proposed giveaways or a Spotify-style service. “We’re always very sceptical about subscription models and ‘freemium’ giveaways,” he said. “As long as it keeps the value of a book then it would be welcome.”

It is not the first time Microsoft has been linked to digital bookselling. In 2014, Barnes & Noble walked away from a deal with the software company after Microsoft invested $300m (£244m) in a deal to distribute B&N’s Nook app.

At the time, Microsoft was reported to be withdrawing completely from the e-reader app market and rumoured developments never materialised.

Neil Gaiman’s TV adaptation of his book Good Omens, written with his late friend and collaborator Terry Pratchett, has been picked up by Amazon Studios for a worldwide release in 2018.

Gaiman, who is also serving as showrunner on the series, has written all six one-hour episodes. The show, which has been co-produced with BBC Studios, will premiere in 2018 on Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video, and will be broadcast on the BBC in the UK soon afterwards.

The fantasy comedy follows Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a devil, who team up to prevent the apocalypse when the antichrist is reborn as a child in rural Britain. The adaptation, based on Gaiman and Pratchett’s 1990 bestseller, will bring the setting forward to the year 2018.

“Good Omens takes place in 2018 when the Apocalypse is near and Final Judgment is set to descend upon humanity. According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner,” Amazon’s description of the series reads.

“So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, and tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a fast-living demon – both of whom have lived among Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle – are not actually looking forward to the coming war. And … someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist.”

In statement, Gaiman said: “Almost 30 years ago, Terry Pratchett and I wrote the funniest novel we could about the end of the world, populated with angels and demons, not to mention an 11-year old antichrist, witchfinders and the four horsepeople of the Apocalypse. It became many people’s favourite book. Three decades later, it’s going to make it to the screen. I can’t think of anyone we’d rather make it with than BBC Studios, and I just wish Sir Terry were alive to see it.”

Gaiman revealed that the series was being developed last year to a crowd of fans at a memorial service for Pratchett. The much-loved author of more than 70 popular fantasy books and creator of the Discworld universe, Pratchett died in 2015.

Head of comedy at BBC Studios Chris Sussman said: “Good Omens has always been one of my favourite books, and it’s hugely exciting not just to be able to bring it to life, but to do so with scripts from Neil Gaiman himself. It feels like a good time to be making a comedy about an impending global apocalypse.”

Good Omens has previously been adapted for BBC Radio 4. A film adaptation, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp as Crowley and Robin Williams as Aziraphale, was proposed to Hollywood in the early 2000s but was never green-lit.

An attempt to give parents a veto over the teaching of books deemed to contain sexually explicit content has been thrown out by Virginia state education authorities, marking the end of a controversial bill that would have enabled parents to ban children from studying classics such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Diary of Anne Frank and Romeo and Juliet if they deemed their content sexual.

Members of the Virginia board of education rejected the proposal, saying defining sexually explicit content was not a matter for the board.

“We are addressing this by saying we are not going to address the sexually explicit issue in the classroom and we are going to rely on local policy to deal with those issues,” board member Daniel Gecker told the Richmond Times.

The board said that while it acknowledged parents had a right to know what children were taught, titles’ content would not be flagged to them.

The decision marked the end of a three-year campaign by parent Laura Murphy, who complained that her son had been assigned Morrison’s Beloved to read in class. Attempts to get a bill through the state senate were stopped last April by governor Terry McAuliffe. Critics of the proposal said content warnings would reduce great works of literature to little more than their so-called salacious content.

Brandishing his mobile phone at the meeting, veteran teacher Charles Miller said: “Ironically, these regulations seek to reduce some of the greatest works of literature to nothing more than one of [text] messages.” Other critics claimed that the definition was so broad it would leave few texts unaffected.

Led by the National Coalition Against Censorship, nine national organisations representing writers, publishers, teachers and civil liberties groups wrote to the Virginia board of education ahead of the meeting on Thursday. Their letter claimed the requirement would infringe the constitutional rights of students and parents.

Pointing out that no requirement was to be imposed on other categories of content, the NCAC warned the proposal “would effectively create a parental consent requirement for all students, including some who are not minors, to read educationally valuable materials that contain some sexual references.”

Virginia has been in the frontline of an ongoing battle over school reading materials. In December 2016, attempts to ban To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from schools in Virginia, after a parent complained about racist language, were heavily criticised.

Assaults on books have extended to other US states. In November 2016, a Tennessee mother campaigned for history books that “promote Islamic propaganda” to be removed from schools. In Iowa, a proposed ban on Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower for “graphic sex” was rejected. A wide-ranging proposal by Washington state to ban “potentially frightening books” from state-subsidised nurseries was also ditched, after it emerged that daycare providers were refusing to read classics like Where the Wild Things Are out of fear that their subsidies would be cut.

Mud-slinging by Donald Trump, as well as his supporters and critics, has not only affected political debate, it has created a vocabulary of insults that lexicographers are struggling to keep up with, as each side becomes more linguistically creative in their bid to knock 10 bells out of social media opponents.

Trumponomics (the president’s economic policy), trumpertantrum (angry early-morning tweeting laced with innuendo and falsehood) and trumpkin (a pumpkin carved to resemble the former TV host) are among neologisms added to a watchlist of words that may be fast-tracked into the Oxford English Dictionary. They follow in the wake of new coinages created by the political upheaval of the last two years, including “alt-right” and “Brexit”, which were added to the reference bible last year.

Eleanor Maier, OED associate editor, said a word would usually have been around for about 10 years before being added to the dictionary, but exceptions are made if a word achieves wide currency quickly and can be used without explanation. “Not everything we log will satisfy our inclusion criteria and some of them are likely to be relatively short-lived,” she said. “But it means we have a record of the usage and a place to add evidence and developments.”

Maier said social media had fast-tracked some words, beyond a relatively small pool of politically active Twitter users, to the wider population.

The new US president had given rise to one of the largest groups of words on the watchlist, which is used to monitor potential new additions to the dictionary, which is effectively the canon for standard British English. Other Trumpian additions include: Trumpflation, the inflation analysts predict will be caused by the new administration’s economic policies; and Trumpist (a Trump supporter), Trumpette (a female Trumpist) and Trumpista (a rare Hispanic Trumpist).

The lexicographer warned that the rapid rise of Trumpisms did not guarantee the US president his own section when the OED is next updated. “It may seem that the current political situation has given rise to new words at a faster rate than before, but it would be interesting to see if Lincoln, Reagan, Thatcher, and Clinton, for example, inspired at the time a similar number of short-lived, and now forgotten, neologisms,” she said.

As well as words that play on the president’s surname, words attributed to the extremes of the political spectrum have been added, though some may not outlive the recent election. Healther, which was based on “birther” and means a person who believes that Hilary Clinton has a serious, undisclosed illness, is likely to go the same way as the Democrat presidential candidate’s election campaign. But Vichy Republican, used by the left to describe a Republican who supports Trump because it is expedient, may live longer if the president’s shoot-from-the-lip style makes his party dump him mid-term.

British political woes have also contributed to the watchlist. Heading those that could make it into the dictionary is Bremainian, used by Brexit supporters about their disappointed referendum opponents. Brexit was added to the OED last year, and is the highest profile word to use “exit” as a suffix. Citing Texit/Calexit (the hypothetical withdrawal of Texas/California from the US), Maier said: “The –exit suffix seems to be following the model of –gate suffix, in giving rise to a number of ephemeral words.” She added: “So it may be that in the future, the –exit suffix is a dictionary entry in its own right.”

One term in common usage but not on the list is “snowflake”, used to describe entitled young people hypersensitive to insult or offence. Writer Chuck Palahniuk coined the label in his novel Fight Club, when his character Tyler Durden said: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”

Last week, Palahniuk told the Evening Standard he had no regrets that the word is most often used by rightwingers to denigrate idealistic young leftists. “There is a kind of new Victorianism,” he told the London newspaper. “Every generation gets offended by different things but my friends who teach in high school tell me that their students are very easily offended.”

The pugnacious writer claimed the modern left “is always reacting to things”. He added: “Once they get their show on the road culturally they will stop being so offended.”

Swedish author Fredrik Colting is being sued for creating children’s versions of classic novels.

Colting, who was taken to court in 2010 for publishing an unofficial sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, is now the subject of a suit filed by Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and the estates of Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway and Arthur C Clarke.

Under the banner Moppet Books, Colting allegedly infringed copyright of four books: On the Road, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Old Man and The Sea and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The injury caused by defendants’ infringement is not purely monetary, as it also impacts the reputation of the Novels, their authors and, by extension, the plaintiff heirs and publishers,” reads the complaint. “Reviewers of the Infringing Works for The New York Times, Forbes, The Guardian and The Chicago Tribune have roundly criticized defendants’ expurgated editions of the Novels.”

Colting has previously published 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye under the pseudonym John David California in the UK but before his death JD Salinger had successfully obtained a court order that stated it could never be released in the US. As the latest complaint reads, Colting had intended for the next adaptation to be The Catcher in the Rye.

In an interview with the New York Times in 2016, Colting stated that the books were not infringing on copyrighted works as they “function as study guides as well as entertainment”.

The suit is demanding that all copies be recalled and profits along with damages be awarded to the plaintiffs.

Crime writer Val McDermid, who is chairing the judges for this year’s Wellcome book prize, has criticised the divide between arts and sciences in the UK’s education system, speaking out as the longlist for the £30,000 award was announced.

In an interview with the Guardian about the longlist, which identifies the best science writing across fiction and nonfiction, The Wire in the Blood author said: “Science is clearly something that we need to be focusing our energy on, because that is where the economic future of the country lies and we really should be driving our education towards it – but that does not mean we should turn our back on the arts.”

Citing her own education in Scotland, McDermid said she feared the modern curriculum left little opportunity for students to be creative and investigate things that engage their interest “for the joy of it”.

“I have concerns about what is happening in education,” added the author, who has a son at school. “Everything is so curriculum-led now that there is very little opportunity for teachers to encourage students to go off and discover things for themselves.”

Developments in education, she added, meant that the Wellcome prize – one of the richest in the UK – was more important than ever because it focuses on making science accessible through both fiction and nonfiction. The 12 books chosen for the 2017 longlist are split between seven factual and five fiction titles, ranging from Victorian gothic in Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent to Jo Marchant’s Cure, which investigates how the mind can cure the body. French novelist Maylis de Kerangal’s blow-by-blow account of a heart transplant in Mend the Living is also longlisted, and is the first foreign-language book to be considered for the award.

Alongside Cure, the seven nonfiction books on the list also include the late Paul Kalanithi’s life-affirming reflection on mortality, When Breath Becomes Air, which is the first posthumously published title to be recognised by the prize. Kalanithi is one of two debut authors featured, the other being Ed Yong, whose book I Contain Multitudes examines the trillions of microbes living in the human body.

Adam Rutherford, who is longlisted for A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, longlisted for The Gene, are among three writers who have been shortlisted before. The other is Sarah Moss, whose novel The Tidal Zone puts her in the running for the third consecutive year.

McDermid said judging the longlist had been “quite a learning curve”. Though not a scientist, the Scottish writer has researched forensics for her bestselling crime fiction. “I had to work quite hard to understand some of the books submitted,” she said. “These books are supposed to be accessible to the general public, so things that were really obscure to me were not going to get through.”

McDermid said there was no blood on the carpet at the judges’ meeting to decide the list, but admitted “there was some lively discussion”. Her fellow judges are scientist and Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen, broadcaster Gemma Cairney, Cambridge professor Tim Lewens and radio producer Di Speirs.

It is the first time in recent years that a longlist has been announced by Wellcome, which has sponsored a literary science prize since 1998. In 2009 it revamped the existing award to one that “celebrates the topics of health and medicine in literature”. Past winners have been predominantly nonfiction, and include Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Marion Coutts’s memoir The Iceberg.

This year’s shortlist will be revealed on 14 March at the London Book Fair. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 24 April at the Wellcome Collection.

The 2017 Wellcome prize longlist

• How to Survive a Plague by David France (US)
• Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari (Israel)
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (US)
• Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (France)
• The Golden Age by Joan London (Australia)
• Cure by Jo Marchant (UK)
• The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss (UK)
• The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee (US)
  
• The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (UK)
  
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford (UK)
  
• Miss Jane by Brad Watson (US)
• I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong (UK)

Authors and staff have reacted cautiously to news that Pearson is to sell its stake in Penguin Random House (PRH), the world’s biggest publisher and home to some of the most successful brands in books, among them Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Oliver and The Girl on the Train.

PRH moved quickly to address fears among staff that the sale of the 47% share to German-owned Bertelsmann would affect jobs. In a statement, global chief executive Markus Dohle promised it would be “business as usual for us”. He added: “Both Pearson and Bertelsmann continue to be very supportive of our strategy and our success, and both have been valued shareholders for us.”

Bertelsmann is expected to increase its holding in the business to 75%, with the remainder funded by private equity. PRH was set up as a joint venture in 2013 following the £2.4bn merger of Penguin and Random House.

Under the agreement reached between the two stakeholders, Pearson had the option of issuing an exit notice – announcing the intention to sell its share – in the first quarter of 2017. Negotiations over terms are expected to take several months.

Authors and staff told the Guardian of fears that the takeover by the German-owned media corporation could lead to further consolidation at the publishing house, which is responsible for one in four books sold and the sale of 800m paper, digital and audiobooks every year.

One bestselling author, who asked not to be named, said the company was “in pretty good shape” but: “You always worry that any added pressure to streamline the business will narrow its publishing focus further.”

Echoing the concerns of other writers the Guardian spoke to, she added: “For any author, you are only as good as your last book, so it’s a worry you could be vulnerable when things like this happen.”

Though staff and literary agents said they had expected Pearson to divest its share in PRH, management failed to assuage worries that this will lead to a reduction in titles published or redundancies.

Pearson chief executive John Fallon said the business was doing well and should be unaffected. He added: “We have great executive confidence in [PRH UK chief executive] Tom Weldon and Markus Dohle. They are doing a very good job in leading the business.”

Before Christmas, PRH terminated its collective agreement with Unite and the National Union of Journalists after talks aimed at protecting collective bargaining and redundancy clauses broke down. Unions claimed company proposals would level down generous redundancy packages for staff on the Penguin side of the business, a claim denied by PRH management.

Authors including Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Antony Beevor joined protests against the move. Management restarted negotiations a few days later.

On Wednesday, John Fallon denied the dispute with the unions was triggered by any plans around the sale of Pearson’s stake. In a statement to staff following the reinstatement of talks, Tom Weldon said: “The negotiations with the unions were never about changing anybody’s terms and conditions.” He added that the negotiations were about the implementation of a single collective bargaining agreement to reflect the 2013 merger.

Staff remained jumpy, according to insiders. “We knew it was going to happen,” said one senior executive. “But we don’t know what will happen now. Hopefully we will be OK.” Another said: “This sort of thing always makes people nervous, but especially so after what happened.”

A meeting between Unite, the NUJ and management is scheduled to go ahead on Friday. It is expected that the renegotiated collective agreement will be on the agenda as well as the Pearson sale.

Agents were more sanguine about the news, which will leave a large slice of English-language book publishing in German and French ownership.

French conglomerate Hachette is snapping at the heels of PRH. It owns, among others, Little, Brown, which publishes JK Rowling’s adult novels as well as her film and play tie-ins, and Ian Rankin’s publisher Orion and Hodder and Stoughton, which publishes Stephen King and David Nicholls.

Literary agents expected the deal would have no immediate impact on clients. “Pearson’s focus has not been in trade publishing for some years, so it makes sense for them to want to sell,” said Jane Gregory of Gregory and Company, whose clients include PRH authors Belinda Bauer and Mo Hayder.

Bertelsmann are, she said, “benign owners” who let its publishing divisions exercise their editorial judgment while “keeping a firm grip on the finances and profit margins”. She added: “I do not think that the sale of the Pearson stake will make much difference to authors.”

Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann chairman and CEO, said it would use its option over Pearson’s stake in PRH “provided the financial terms are fair”. He added that the move would strengthen one of the conglomerate’s most important “content businesses” and would further strengthen its presence in the US, Bertelsmann’s second largest market.

Describing the company as the “publisher of choice for authors”, Rabe added: “We want to continue on this path. As the majority shareholder, Bertelsmann will continue to guarantee the continuity of Penguin Random House’s business development, as well as the independence of our publishers.”

After threatening to do it a week before the US presidential elections last November, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has confirmed he has destroyed his green card because Donald Trump won.

Soyinka, the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature, was jailed twice for his criticism of the Nigerian government during the 1960s, famously composing protest poems on toilet paper from his cell in solitary confinement. In 1994, Soyinka’s passport was confiscated by the de facto president Sani Abacha after he urged Nigerians to not pay taxes, as their money would aid the military. After years of living in voluntary exile and teaching overseas, Soyinka eventually sought refuge in the United States that same year, with the help of former US president Jimmy Carter. He later received a death sentence in absentia in 1997, from the regime under Abacha.

On 2 November, six days before the US election, Soyinka told a student audience at Oxford University’s Ertegun House that he would hold his own, self-described “Wolexit” if Trump won, and destroy his green card. “If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, I’m not waiting for that,” he said at the time. “The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up.”

In an interview with the Atlantic on Tuesday, Soyinka confirmed he had followed through on his pledge to destroy his green card if Trump won as he celebrated Thanksgiving with his family in the US.

Soyinka, who has returned to living mainly in Nigeria since Abacha died in 1998, said he had made his green card “inoperable”. He did not expand on how he had destroyed it, but said: “I don’t have strong enough fingers to tear up a green card. As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a regular visa with others. I’m no longer part of the society, not even as a resident.”

Soyinka described the act as cathartic: “I delivered myself from uncertainty, from discomfort, from internal turmoil.”

In an interview with Nigeria’s the Interview magazine in November, Soyinka said he would destroy his green card in preparation for Trump’s inauguration on 20 January and that he “felt disaster in my marrow” as he watched the election results come in. “Trump’s wall is already under construction,” he said. “Walls are built in the mind, and Trump has erected walls, not only across the mental landscape of America, but across the global landscape.”

Steve Berry could be forgiven for asking himself every day what it takes to make a book a global bestseller. Back in 2003, the former lawyer published a novel that placed well-known myths in a conspiracy web to create a page-turning thriller.

Sound familiar? It should, except you’re thinking of Dan Brown and his flagellating priests in the multimillion seller The Da Vinci Code – not Berry’s tale of Nazis hunting Russian treasure in the barely known The Amber Room.

Published in the same year, with a male-female double act tracking down artefacts in a global conspiracy – why would one book sell so many copies and not the other? There is a cryptological tool that might help Berry find an answer: the list of books that have sold more than one million copies since the turn of the century, produced for the Specsavers bestseller awards later this week.

The data collated since 1998 by Nielsen BookScan, which monitors sales through bookshops, supermarkets and online, offers many clues to what makes a bestseller.

A curious mix of unrelated titles, it ranges from bonking and bondage in EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey – the only “sextuple platinum” bestseller, having sold 6.5m copies – to Eric Carle’s ravenous larva in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, placing Arthur Golden’s The Memoirs of a Geisha alongside Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea. There are only two Booker prize winners – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – sitting alongside the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, The Atkins Diet and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. All that unites them is that each has sold more than one million copies, with all of them set to be honoured with the publishing world’s new equivalent of silver, gold and platinum discs.

Are there any trends among the top few? To sell a million, it helps to be a woman – with a man’s name. Though more men have sold more than 250,000 copies of their books, women dominate the biggest sellers: EL James’s debut whipped up sales of 6.5m, seeing off stiff competition from JK Rowling’s multimillion selling Harry Potter series. Not far behind are Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

It must be observed that James and Rowling both rendered their names gender-neutral – a lesson not lost on thriller writer Alex Marwood, who used to write under her real name Serena Mackesy.

Mackesy’s writing career had been grinding to a halt, and The Darkest Secret author faced the loss of her home. Drastic action was needed and that meant a name change. “Books by women get less coverage and fewer prizes than those by men and, as we all know, a lot of men won’t read books by women,” Mackesy explains. She needed a name that wouldn’t cause sniggers among snotty booksellers each time a customer asked for her books. “Booksellers were spending more time correcting people’s pronunciation of Mackesy than they were selling my books,” she adds.

Using her grandmother’s surname and an androgynous, classless first name, she moved publishers and unleashed The Wicked Girls. The book topped bestseller lists and earned a nod from Stephen King, who chose it as one of his books of the year.

There may be less speculative ways of earning a living than writing a novel, but it seems clear that those who make it to the top of the bestseller lists write because they have a passion for the story they are working on, not because it will make them rich.

Kate Mosse, whose breakout grail novel Labyrinth is among the Specsavers bestsellers, said that writing it felt as if “I put my hands on the keyboard and burned my fingers”. The founder of the Baileys women’s prize for fiction adds: “I really felt the story mattered and that I had to do it justice. I had no expectations for it, I just felt it had to be written.” She would wake in the middle of the night teasing over plot points in the novel, which slips between medieval Carcassonne and present day.

But Labyrinth was not powered solely by Mosse’s desire to write, it was aided by a large slice of luck, she admits. “I know that you can do everything right, but in the end there is that piece of luck that plays for or against you.” The novel arrived in time to pick up the insatiable appetite for Templar novels following The Da Vinci Code, whereas Steve Berry broke cover too early.

But there is something more in the list waiting to be revealed: enthusiasm. Every book on the list was powered by an excitement that began in the imagination of the author and made evangelists of everyone who read it whether they were agents, editors, booksellers or readers.

“How do publishers know that they have a potential breakout bestseller from an author?” asks Jane Johnson, George RR Martin’s publisher at HarperCollins. “Experience and ‘editor’s itch’.”

This is a potentially infectious condition – the unique excitement that makes the hair on her neck stand on end when she reads a manuscript with the potential to go gangbusters.

So being a bestseller doesn’t come down to the quality of the writing alone, but more often when a writer hits on something in the air that signals the start of a trend. Agent Lizzy Kremer, who represents Paula Hawkins of The Girl on a Train fame, says she knows it when she finds it. “As soon as we started talking about the idea for The Girl on the Train, we both knew it had huge potential,” she says.

What would give Kremer a frisson of excitement now? Suburban noir: “It won’t be the first thriller set in the suburbs,” she says. “But it will somehow redefine the suburbs in our imagination, and hit the nail on the head harder than it has ever been hit before.”

So luck, timing and the eye of a keen agent are very useful things to acquire if you want to get rich. At least Steve Berry doesn’t need to adjust his name.

The world of children’s publishing is in mourning after the death on Sunday of one of its brightest, most eccentric and anarchic characters, Babette Cole.

Children’s laureate Chris Riddell and Michael Rosen were among those to pay tribute to the author and illustrator, whose books include the 1986 classic of feminist fairytale revisionism, Princess Smartypants, which reimagined the archetypal girl heroine as a motorbiking tearaway.

Riddell described the Jersey-born author, who died after a short illness at the age of 66, as unique.

“I met her at publishing parties and she was always so full of fun and dressed to the nines,” he said. “It was in keeping with the joyful wit of her work, exuberant, heartfelt and very funny. Princess Smartypants. We will all miss her.”

Cole’s anarchic sense of humour figured high in tributes from fellow writers. Former children’s laureate Rosen said Cole had broken new ground in writing about sex, death and gender with “books that come over first and foremost as incredible fun, full of laughs and craziness”.

“Clearly, behind this lay a belief that shame and self-blame were destructive forces and that we had everything to gain from being truthful, frank and equal in our dealings with each other,” he added.

Lucy Coats, who writes picture books as well as children’s novels, said: “Her wit, humour and dedication to breaking down the barriers of gender stereotyping will be much missed, as will her eccentric dress sense.”

Two years ago, Cole was left battered and bruised after she was trampled by a herd of cows. Recalling the attack, Grunts creator Philip Ardagh said: “Despite the seriousness of her injuries, it somehow felt so typical … if anyone was going to be attacked by cows it would be her.”

He added: “Her glorious drawing style made her illustrations easily identifiable at 50 paces and her stories – whether they were about where babies come from, death, bunnies or a princess called Smartypants – were clever and captivating, often covering important topics with accessible ease.”

News of her death was announced by Inky Sprat, the ebook publishing company she founded with Manus Home and Neil Baber in 2013. “We will dearly miss her, as will children around the world miss her wonderful, often irreverent, and always unique stories and illustrations,” the statement read.

Home said: “She was one of the great rulebreaking characters of children’s publishing. We are all just stunned at this news. She was very much the driving force of the business.”

The flamboyant author was known as much for her personal style as her funny books. On her blog, fellow children’s author and illustrator Sarah McIntyre, who presented a number of events with her, said: “She lived by her own set of rules. I was a bit scared of her – she might say or do anything, but I loved her.” She added: “She often left me dizzy and bewildered, but always laughing.”

Cole wrote and illustrated more than 70 children’s books. Dr Dog, about the Guimboyles’ family pet, who doubles as their physician, was adapted into a successful cartoon series. In 1986 she received the Kate Greenaway medal for Princess Smartypants, an honour she repeated with Prince Cinders in 1987.

Not one to shy away from difficult subjects, she helped parents broach tough subjects with their children. Mummy Laid an Egg, which covered sex education, was a “godsend to parents” Lucy Coats said. It was acclaimed illustrated book of the year at the 1994 British book awards.

After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, where she studied animation, Cole collaborated with Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate to create children’s BBC TV programmes including Bagpuss. She also worked on The Clangers and Basil Brush.

In 2015 she was commissioned to illustrate a 70th-anniversary edition of Enid Blyton’s classic The Famous Five: Five on a Treasure Island.

Passionate about horses, she owned a small stud farm in Devon, which bred multi-award winning show ponies, hunters and cobs.

Jacob Polley has won the 2016 TS Eliot prize with Jackself, a collection described by the judges as “a firework of a book”.

The loosely autobiographical poems use the “Jack” of nursery rhyme and local legend to tell the story of a childhood in rural Cumbria, from the “cartilage stew and spreadable carrots” of school dinners to the limpets the title character “rives from a crevice” on the rocky shore at low tide, “where the pools gaze / with new lenses at their grotto walls / flinching with jellies”.

Polley emerged as winner of the UK’s richest poetry prize at a ceremony on Monday evening at the Wallace Collection gallery in London. The book was chosen from a 10-strong shortlist including the winner of the 2015 Forward prize, Vahni Capildeo, and previous TS Eliot prizewinner Alice Oswald.

It is third time lucky for the Carlisle born-poet, who was first shortlisted for his debut collection The Brink in 2003, and then again with The Havocs in 2012.

Polley, who was born in 1975, was among 20 to be named the Next Generation of best British poets by the Poetry Book Society in 2004 on the strength of his first collection. He has also written a novel, Talk of the Town, which won the 2010 Somerset Maugham award, and collaborated with director Ian Fenton on a short film, Keeping House, about the history of a recently closed cockle-selling shop in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He teaches at Newcastle University.

Chair of judges, Ruth Padel, who was joined on the panel by fellow poets Julia Copus and Alan Gillis, said Jackself was “a firework of a book; inventive, exciting and outstanding in its imaginative range and depth of feeling”.

She added: “Rather like Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, he is looking at a childhood though a very English mythology. He has taken a word out of Gerard Manley Hopkins – ‘Jackself’ – as the starting point for a collection that is incredibly inventive and very moving.

“It’s a sort of autobiography, set in a place called Lamanby, but it’s really like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, where everything is strange. His mastery of phrase and rhythm and the control of line, combined with the hurts of childhood and his glee in inventive language, have taken his writing to a new level.”

Polley is the 23rd winner of the prize, which carries a purse of £20,000. It was founded by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 and is now run by the TS Eliot Foundation.

It was the lynching that outraged African Americans, spurred the civil rights movement and etched the victim’s name in history: Emmett Till.

The 14-year-old Chicagoan was visiting relatives in the cotton country of the Mississippi delta on 24 August 1955 when he allegedly wolf-whistled at a white woman.

Three days later his body was found in the Tallahatchie river. Till had a bullet hole in the head, an eye gouged out and other wounds. The murderers had wrapped barbed wire around his neck and weighted him down with a cotton gin fan.

It was a ghastly crime that changed the United States but the woman at the center of it, Carolyn Bryant, long remained an enigma.

A few weeks after the murder, the then 21-year-old testified in court that Till had grabbed and verbally harassed her in a grocery store. “I was just scared to death,” she said.

The all-white jury cleared her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam of the crime. They later publicly admitted their guilt, saying they wanted to warn other blacks. Carolyn Bryant disappeared from public view.

Now, 62 years later, it has emerged that she fabricated her testimony about Till making physical and verbal advances.

“That part’s not true,” Bryant told Timothy Tyson, the author of a new book, The Blood of Emmet Till.

That four-word confession, of sorts, has provided an unexpected coda to a story whose victim is commemorated annually.

Bryant spoke to Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, in 2007, when she was 72. The admission was not made public until now.

Bryant, who is still alive at an undisclosed location, told the author she could not remember other details about the fleeting encounter with Till, who went into the store to buy gum.

She did, however, express regret. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” She said she “felt tender sorrow” for Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.

Bryant’s comments still leave questions over what precisely transpired in the grocery store but they do suggest its bloody and controversial aftermath marked her.

“That case went a long way toward ruining her life,” Tyson told Vanity Fair. The author did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago and Jet magazine published photos of his corpse, sparking revulsion and galvanising the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks said Till was on her mind in December 1955 when she refused give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, kickstarting nationwide protests.

The killing has been the subject of a play by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a poem by the Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, and a song by Bob Dylan.

Once acquitted of murder (the jury deliberated for barely an hour), Bryant’s husband and Milam were protected against further prosecution by the double jeopardy rule and so admitted the crime to Look magazine.

“I’m no bully,” Milam said. “I never hurt a nigger in my life. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice … ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble, I’m going to make an example of you, just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”

The case was reopened by the FBI in 2004 to see if any accomplices could be brought to justice. But in 2007, a grand jury decided there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

It’s the kind of moment every archivist dreams of: an obscure paper trail proving the institution for whom one works played a forgotten but pivotal role in history. And it is exactly what Chris Schüler found as he rummaged through the archives of the Authors’ Club while researching a new book.

Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies, published this week after being crowdfunded on Kickstarter is packed with anecdotes and marks the 125th anniversary of the club, housed near Whitehall in London. Perhaps best known as sponsor of a number of book awards, the club should also be remembered for some of its more disreputable members, said Schüler.

Two in particular stand out: Douglas Jerrold and Hugh Pollard. Major Pollard was a shady, veteran spy with a reputation for letting off his pistol at random in public places, while Jerrold was a publisher, and such a fusty one that Anthony Powell once asked of him: “How did he ever get out of The Forsyte Saga?”

But, as Schüler discovered, the two leading club members “engineered the start of the Spanish civil war”.

“In 1936, Jerrold got together over lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand with an aeronautical engineer and Louis Bolin, the London correspondent of a Spanish nationalist newspaper. Bolin later became press officer to [Spanish dictator] General Franco,” Schüler said. “Together they hatched a plot to charter a light aircraft to the Canaries for what looked like a holiday jaunt. But it wasn’t.”

What the three planned was to help Franco – who had been stationed on the island by the government in order to neuter his power – to reach his troops and lead a coup. Jerrold phoned Pollard, an old friend of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, and arranged for a plane to take them on the supposed jaunt. To add credibility to the trip, Pollard recruited his daughter Diana and her friend Dorothy Watson, whom Jerrold noted “kept her cigarettes in her knickers”, adding approvingly: “Obviously she was the type that went to Africa.”

On 11 July, the plane flew to La Palma, where it picked up Franco and took him to Morocco, from where he invaded Spain and started the civil war.

“We had some very discreditable members over the years, but that is my absolute favourite story of all those I uncovered,” said Schüler, a former chair of the Authors’ Club, past membership of which reads like a roll call of the greatest British literati: George Bernard Shaw, Ford Madox Ford, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene and Brigid Brophy.

A more benign revolution was brought about by Brophy in 1967, when the feminist novelist and essayist gave a speech to the male-only membership about their exclusion of women. Schüler uncovered scraps of her speech, Being a Woman Writer, on strips of pink notepaper. Brophy railed at members for excluding women, because “the name of your club makes free with the name of what is, after all, my profession”.

Sharpening her pen, she added: “In [London] SW10, I am recognised as an author, but when I cross London it seems I am overtaken by an invisible change. When I arrive here in SW1, I am no longer an author, I have a dreadful suspicion that I know what you think I am. You think I am an authoress.”

Though it took another four years for the club to admit women, Schüler believes Brophy’s speech was a turning point for women in the most exclusive part of British society, the gentlemen’s clubs of London. “It became the first major club to let women in, well before the Reform, which was 10 years later, and the Athenaeum, which was 20 years later,” he said. Sadly, Brophy’s words have yet to have any effect on the Garrick Club, White’s, Pratt’s, Boodles, Brooks’s, the Turf Club and the Travellers’ Club – all London clubs that remain bastions of male-only membership.

Prince Charles, a vocal critic of climate change sceptics, has penned a Ladybird book on the subject after lamenting with experts the lack of a basic guide to the subject.

The prince has joined forces with two leading environmental campaigners to produce The Ladybird Book on Climate Change, the first in a new series aimed at adults, The Ladybird Expert, is to be published later this month.

The 48-page hardback, in the style of the iconic children’s Ladybird series popular in the 1960s and 70s, is co-authored by the former executive director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper, and Cambridge-based polar scientist, Emily Shuckburgh.

Perhaps mindful of the prince’s passionate views on the subject – he once called sceptics “the headless chicken brigade” – publishers Penguin Books have taken the precaution of having the book “extensively peer reviewed by figures within the environmental community”.

The idea is said to have come to Charles when he was invited to address the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris in 2015. Speaking with experts on the subject of global warming, he discussed with them the lack of a basic guide to the complex subject, a source said.

Penguin was approached in spring last year and the publisher was enthusiastic. After the prince and his co-authors produced their first draft, Penguin turned to David Warrilow, chairman of the climate science special interest group at the Royal Meteorological Society, and a team of seven other climate specialists to go through the 5,000-word manuscript before publication.

The final version was agreed in August, at a meeting at Balmoral, where the prince was holidaying.

The Ladybird books have enjoyed recent success with the publication of new spoof guides. The successful pastiche humour series – The Ladybird Books for Grown-ups, offering a take on everything from hipsters to mindfulness, and grandparents to sickies – have sold more than 3 million copies since 2015.

The approach to Penguin came at the right time. “It was a coincidence, where we were thinking about a new series for adults after the huge success of the spoof books, but this time wanted some factual books by experts on science, history and arts subjects,” White said. “So the call and the idea from Clarence House was the catalyst for the new series.”

The books feature illustrations in the old-fashioned style of the original Ladybird titles. The cover of Climate Change shows the East Sussex town of Uckfield, replicating a photograph of the devastating flooding there in October 2000.

“His Royal Highness, Emily and I had to work very hard to make sure that each word did its job, while at the same time working with the pictures to deliver the points we needed to make. I hope we’ve managed to paint a vivid picture, and like those iconic titles from the 60s and 70s, created a title that will stand the test of time,” Juniper told the Mail on Sunday.

Penguin said the series offers a bite-sized understanding of a challenging subject and that all the books in the new series have been written by leading lights in their fields, and provide informed expert opinions. More authors, including historian Suzannah Lipscomb, space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock and classical music critic Fiona Maddocks, have been signed up to write for the new adult series.

Charles has himself been the subject of a Ladybird book, published in 1981, on the occasion of his wedding to Lady Diana Spencer.

The creators of the BBC1 hit series The Night Manager are to adapt another of John Le Carré’s popular books: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The BBC1 show will be another co-production with US network AMC, following the huge success of The Night Manager, which starred Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman.

Le Carré said he was looking forward to seeing a new version of it on screen: “I’m very excited by the project, and have great confidence in the team.”

The team behind The Night Manager are now turning their attention to the author’s most famous book, which is set during the cold war, just months after the Berlin Wall was built.

Simon Beaufoy, the writer of Slumdog Millionaire and The Full Monty, has been enlisted by the BBC to adapt the series, while The Ink Factory, which worked on The Night Manager, will produce.

Beaufoy said: “It’s incredibly exciting to be working on the best cold war spy story ever written.”

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was written in 1963, follows Alec Leamas, a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose east Berlin network is in tatters.

His agents have either disappeared or are dead at the hands of the East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt, but Leamas is soon offered a chance of revenge when he is recalled to London.

The novel received critical acclaim at the time of its publication and became an international bestseller. In 1965, it was adapted into a film starring Richard Burton.

In 2010, it was selected as one of the All-Time 100 Novels by Time magazine, which described it as “a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he’s forgotten how to tell the truth”.

Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, said: “Following the huge global success of The Night Manager, it’s a privilege to announce that John Le Carré will return to BBC1 with one of the best spy thrillers ever written.”

Academic texts that have shaped our society may range from John Berger’s landmark study of visual culture Ways of Seeing to Germaine Greer’s 1970 feminist classic The Female Eunuch, but when it comes to a vote to decide which was the most influential book for modern Britain, the public echoed America’s Bill Clinton: it’s the economy, stupid.

From a list of the 20 texts that shaped our times, curated by leading British academics as part of Academic Book Week, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was voted the most significant for modern Britain.

In what will disappoint prime minister Theresa May, the top five texts in the list had a distinct leaning to the left. In second place was The Invention of Tradition, edited by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, with EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class coming in third. Berger, who died earlier this month, came fourth in a list dominated by historians. Fifth was Peter Fryer’s pioneering history of black people in Britain, Staying Power.

Keynes knew what he was on to when he wrote The General Theory. In a letter to playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw, he wrote: “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory, which will largely revolutionise – not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next few years – the way the world thinks about economic problems.”

The book formed the basis for Keynesian economics, which has been a hugely influential economic model in the UK since the Great Depression, and, thanks to Keynesian advocate Gordon Brown, played a key role following the 2008 crash. Brown’s famous quote “no more boom and bust” was a direct reference to The General Theory’s central thesis.

Keynes 1936 opus posits that during recessions economic output is strongly influenced by total spending in the economy in the short term and advocates state intervention to moderate “boom and bust” cycles. It challenged neoclassical economics by relating employment not to the price of labour but to the spending of money, which creates demand.

Commenting on the book, John Kay, visiting professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said: “The analysis of the book was the dominant influence on macroeconomic policies in the 30 years that followed the second world war, and we still debate, and employ, Keynesian policies today.”

Alan Staton, head of marketing and communications at the Booksellers Association, which co-sponsors the promotion, said that it would have been an unlikely winner even a year ago. He added: “Yet here we are with a newly minted industrial strategy from the PM that bears distinctly Keynesian hallmarks and is in desperate need of just such an economic road map as The General Theory.”

The book was chosen in a public poll to mark events across the country aimed at promoting scholarly books to the public for Academic Book Week, which finishes on Saturday. The event aims to “open up the dialogue” between makers and users of academic books.

The full list

• A Brief History of Time (1968) by Stephen Hawking
• Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (2013) by Matthew J Goodwin and Robert Ford
• Ways of Seeing (1972) by John Berger
• Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler
• The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins
• Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) by AV Dicey
• Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) by Peter Fryer
• The Double Helix (1968) by James Watson
• The Invention of Tradition (1983) edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
• The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by EP Thompson
• Purity and Danger (1966) by Mary Douglas
• The Uses of Literacy (1957) by Richard Hoggart
• Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979) by Peter Townsend
• Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) by John Maynard Keynes
• The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer
• Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1990) by RF Foster
• The English and Their History (2014) by Robert Tombs
• The Road to Serfdom (1994) by Friedrich Hayek
• The Scottish Nation (1999) by Tom Devine

The feminist author and commentator Roxane Gay has pulled publication of her forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster in protest of its support of the notorious “alt-right” figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the book in,” Gay said in a statement to BuzzFeed News, explaining that her upcoming book How to Be Heard was to be published through TED Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

“I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation,” she said.

Yiannopoulos gained public notoriety after he was banned from Twitter for leading a racist and sexist campaign against the female-starring Ghostbusters reboot and the Saturday Night Live comedian Leslie Jones.

His book Dangerous received a $250,000 advance from Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, horrifying many in the publishing industry. The editor of the Chicago Review of Books announced the publication would not review any Simon & Schuster books this year because the company “peddles hate speech for profit”.

But Gay, an associate professor at Purdue University, a New York Times columnist and the author of multiple books, including Bad Feminist, a bestselling 2014 collection of essays, is the first major author to stop her publishing relationship with the company.

“I can afford to take this stand. Not everyone can. Remember that,” she tweeted.

Her decision follows a letter sent to authors by the Simon & Schuster president and CEO, Carolyn Reidy, reassuring them of the book’s content. “I want to make it clear that we do not support or condone, nor will we publish, hate speech,” she wrote. “Not from our authors. Not in our books. Not at our imprints. Not from our employees and not in our workplace.”

A comic revival of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five characters gave WH Smith reason for cheer over the key festive trading period.

Strong sales of spoof titles such as Five on Brexit Island, Five Give up the Booze, and the Ladybird for Grown Ups series, helped to lift sales by 1% at stores open for more than a year over the 21 weeks to 21 January. Total sales rose by 2%.

While customers returned to the adventures of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and dog Timmy, first introduced to the public during the second world war, they turned their backs on adult colouring books. Hugely popular over the same period a year earlier, sales tumbled by about 60% to 70%, according to the WH Smith chief executive, Stephen Clarke.

“They have fallen off a cliff,” Clarke said. “Last year was their first year really and people are no longer colouring in the way they were.”

The retailer, which this year celebrates its 225th birthday, said higher customer numbers at its airport shops over Christmas also helped boosted trade. Sales within the travel division – which also includes motorway service stations, hospitals and railway stations – grew by 5%, but were down by 3% at its shops on UK high streets.

Clarke said the group was up against the toughest year-on-year sales comparisons in more than a decade, after the first rise in Christmas like-for-like sales at high street in 12 years last year, fuelled by the colouring craze.

“As a result of the performance in travel we expect group profit growth for the year to be slightly ahead of plan,” Clarke said.

“While there is some uncertainty in the broader economic environment, we remain confident that the group is well positioned for the year ahead as we continue to focus on profitable growth, cash generation and investing in new opportunities.”

Clarke said WH Smith customers would be protected from Brexit-related price rises this year, partly because only about 5% of the goods and materials bought by the company are priced in dollars. Some retailers have warned that the weak pound will lead to a rise in prices this year, as materials imported from abroad are more expensive.

“We’re in a slightly better position than other retailers, particularly clothing retailers and electronics,” said Clark. “We’re doing everything we can to avoid putting our prices up.”

Shares in the retailer rose by 7.6% to £15.93, making the retailer the biggest riser on the FTSE 250.

Retail analyst Nick Bubb said the trading update would be a source of relief for investors. “Although the comparisons were tough, the business has come through well. How far the 225th anniversary celebrations of the company help trade this year remains to be seen, but the City will be relieved by the strong Christmas trading performance,” he said.

WH Smith now has 145 post offices inside its high street shops, with a further 23 planned over the rest of the financial year.

Top 10 best-selling spoof books

1. Five on Brexit Island

2. The Grandparent

3. The Cat

4. The Dog

5. Five Give up the Booze

6. The Meeting

7. Five go on a Strategy Day

8. The Meeting

9. The Mum

10. Zombie Apocalypse

Sales of George Orwell’s dystopian drama 1984 have soared after Kellyanne Conway, adviser to the reality-TV-star-turned-president, Donald Trump, used the phrase “alternative facts” in an interview. As of Tuesday, the book was the sixth best-selling book on Amazon.

Comparisons were made with the term “newspeak” used in the 1949 novel, which was used to signal a fictional language that aims at eliminating personal thought and also “doublethink”. In the book Orwell writes that it “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”.

The connection was initially made on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase,” said Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty.

Conway’s use of the term was in reference to White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comments about last week’s inauguration attracting “the largest audience ever”. Her interview was widely criticized and she was sub-tweeted by Merriam-Webster dictionary with a definition of the word fact. On last night’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host joked: “Kellyanne Conway is like someone trying to do a Jedi mind trick after only a week of Jedi training.”

In 1984, a superstate wields extreme control over the people and persecutes any form of independent thought.

In reply to Donald Trump’s election victory – and in lightning quick time – novelist Howard Jacobson has delivered a comic fairytale that the Man Booker prize winner hopes not only explains why Trump won, but provides the “consolation of savage satire”.

Pussy is set to be published in April by Jonathan Cape, and was written by The Finkler Question author in what he described as “a fury of disbelief” in the two months after the November result. A departure from his usual contemporary fiction, the 50,000 word novella tells the story of Prince Fracassus, heir to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality TV shows and fantasising about sex workers.

Idle, boastful and thin-skinned as well as ignorant and egotistical, Fracassus seems the last person capable of leading his country. But what seems impossible becomes reality all too readily.

“Fiction can’t match reality at the moment,” Jacobson said. “The book’s been brewing in me since the beginning of 2016. I was in the US early last year promoting [My Name Is] Shylock and watching this man [Trump] on TV in horror. It was unbelievable.”

After the election, what had been brewing exploded onto the page. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn every morning and write it,” he added, admitting that Pussy was the fastest book he had ever written. “I’m a slow writer normally,” he said. “I believe in slow writing.”

Writing had been “hugely cathartic”, Jacobson said, because he was making himself laugh. In 2010, he became one of only two comic novelists to win the Booker – the other being Kingsley Amis, with The Old Devils, in 1986.

Jacobson said he hoped the new book would offer the “consolation of savage satire” to readers depressed at the year’s events and hit the new inhabitant of the Oval Office where it hurts: the ego. “Satire is an important weapon in the fight against what is happening and Trump looks like a person who is particularly vulnerable to derision,” he explained.

As well as Trump, the story takes pot shots at the president’s enablers and fans on both sides of the Atlantic. Walk-on parts are given to characters not too far removed from British political life. Asked whether leading Brexiters appear, Jacobson said: “Certainly you will be able to recognise some of them.” He added that Hillary Clinton makes a surprising appearance towards the end.

Though written with to make readers laugh, the book is more than a satire, Jacobson said: “I wanted to get over Trump’s moral bankruptcy but also the sheer bankruptcy of a culture that could produce him.” In particular, he wanted to convey the damage done to political discourse by the social networking site Twitter, which Trump has used to bypass traditional media.

Though the novelist regarded Trump as “dumb”, he said the former reality TV star had a sharp instinct for Twitter that had enabled him to address voters without the scrutiny of the press. “Social media thrives on the assertive single point of view, which is what he is able to do,” Jacobson said. Likening what has happened to a coup, he added: “If you have Twitter, you don’t need tanks.”

The Manchester-born writer and broadcaster said he had long hankered to write a fairytale, though he admitted changing his writing style to match the form had been difficult. “I had to write much shorter sentences,” he joked, saying that Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s Candide had inspired him.

Pussy is not Jacobson’s first venture into fairytale fiction. “One of the first things that I did as a student at Cambridge in 1964 was write a fairytale called The Ogre of Downing Castle about my tutor,” he said. His tutor? The hugely influential literary critic FR Leavis, author of The Great Tradition.

Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich has quit the Russian PEN centre to protest against the expulsion of journalist and activist Sergey Parkhomenko, joining 30 other writers including novelist Boris Akunin and poet Lev Rubinstein leaving the organisation.

Alexievich, who withdrew from the organisation on 11 January, wrote in a statement: “My comment on Parkhomenko’s exclusion [from PEN] can only be my application to leave the Russian PEN, whose founding ideals were cravenly violated. In the perestroika years we took pride in our PEN but now we are ashamed of it. Russian writers acted as subserviently and outrageously only during the Stalinist period. But Putin will go, whereas this shameful page from the history of PEN will stay. And the names will stay, too. We now live through times when we cannot win over evil, we are powerless before the ‘red man’. But he cannot stop time. I believe in that.”

Thirty writers have now left Russian PEN, with many publishing their withdrawal letters online. Akunin – one of Russia’s most widely read contemporary authors of detective fiction – withdrew the day before Alexievich. Akunin said that he felt Russian PEN did not stand for freedom of speech, that it failed to defend persecuted writers and therefore has “nothing in common” with the global network of PEN centres. There are 145 PEN centres in more than 100 countries, working with the core mission “to defend and promote freedom of expression, and to remove barriers to literature”.

The Russian PEN Centre expelled Parkhomenko for “provocative activity” and “for trying to destroy the organisation from within”. According to their minutes from the 28 December meeting, all 15 members of the board unanimously voted for the journalist’s expulsion.

Parkhomenko said that his expulsion was a punishment for a Facebook post, reported on radio station Echo Moskvy’s website, where he criticised Russian PEN Centre’s chiefs for refusing to support Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is serving 20 years in prison after being convicted in a Russian court for “terrorist activity”.

Sentsov was arrested in 2014 and found guilty the following year of planning terrorist acts in Crimea, including setting fire to the offices of a political party in Simferopol, Crimea’s regional capital, and attempting to explode a statue of Lenin. The court ruling was widely criticised as unfounded, with Amnesty International declaring it “redolent of Stalinist-era show trials”. After having spent three years in a Russian prison, he revealed in 2016 in a smuggled letter that he was now in a Siberian penal colony.

Parkhomenko is known as a dissent figure in Russia. He was a key leader in Russia’s protest movement in 2011, which gathered more thant 60,000 people in Moscow and St Petersburg to challenge the presidential election results that gave Vladimir Putin his third term in office. In 2012, he co-founded the League of Voters, which carried lawsuits against the government’s election fraud. In 2014, he participated in the Congress “Ukraine – Russia: A Dialogue”, organised by Ukrainian civil-society organisations and the former head of the Yukos oil company Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The conference aimed to bring Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals, journalists, writers and politicians together to find solutions to the crisis in Ukraine.

In a statement to the Guardian, PEN International executive director Carles Torner said: “We are aware of conflict between the writers at Russian PEN and while all centres are independent they must abide by the principles of the PEN Charter. With this in mind we are monitoring the situation closely and are in touch with all the parties concerned.”

Robert Carlyle has suggested a third Trainspotting film may be on the way after saying he’s been “talking about that” with producers.

Carlyle, who plays hardman Franco Begbie in 1996’s Trainspotting, as well as its soon-to-be-released sequel T2 Trainspotting, was speaking to reporters before T2’s premiere in Edinburgh. “We’ve been talking about that, I am up for doing it,” he said. “So maybe we ain’t seen the end of Begbie just yet.”

T2 is based on Porno, the 2002 novel that Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh conceived as a sequel to his 1993 original; in 2016 Welsh published The Blade Artist, which focuses on an older Begbie, who has reinvented himself as a sculptor and is living in California with a new family.

Carlyle said: “[T2] is the first time you see maybe there is another side to this guy ... There is something quite emotional about that. He’s capable of feeling something more than just rage, so I am pleased that that element of Begbie has been shown.

“And maybe that sets up another film in fact, because Irvine Welsh has written The Blade Artist.”

A £20,000 literary prize is being launched by Amazon for new work by authors releasing their work on Kindle’s self-publishing platform.

The Kindle Storyteller award is open to authors writing in English across any genre, fiction or non-fiction, for books launched on Kindle Direct Publishing between 20 February and 19 May 2017.

Reader interest will be taken into consideration when compiling the shortlist as well as the opinions of a judging panel, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in London in July. The prize will also include a marketing campaign and the possibility of translation for international sales.

Alessio Santarelli, Amazon’s EU Kindle content director, said the prize was intended to celebrate great books. “We hope to encourage aspiring authors and those who have already been published, to get writing and make their new stories available to readers across the world,” he said.

Up to a quarter of the top 100 titles in the UK Kindle store already come from the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Rachel Abbott, a bestselling Kindle author who has just released her sixth thriller on the platform, said she expected the calibre of entries to be high, “whether it’s from an established author or an aspiring writer who is encouraged by this prize to publish their first book”.

Titles submitted for the prize must be previously unpublished, and a minimum of 5,000 words in length with no upper word limit.

The writer Jeanette Winterson is to close her shop in London because of an overhaul of the business rates system, which will dramatically increase the amount of tax retailers pay in the capital.

The award-winning author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit said the delicatessen store she owns in Spitalfields, east London, would have to shut because the rateable value had gone from £21,500 to £54,000.

“I had three choices, close it, sell it, or hand it over to the big boys,” she said.

The new business rates come into effect in April and will cut the bills for struggling northern towns. But while areas such as Bolton and Blackpool will experience a drop in business rates of up to 56%, shops on Regent Street in central London face an 87% increase.

The hike, in addition to a slump in sterling since the Brexit vote, has put pressure on retailers, many of whom fear they will be forced to close down.

“It’s either the law of unintended consequences, in which case the Tories are more stupid than anybody ever imagined, or it’s a way of driving out all the independents in London and handing over the space to the big guys,” Winterson said.

“They are going around saying: ‘Well, 70% of businesses in England will benefit’, the usual headline stuff, which is technically true, except that most high streets are boarded up and loads of businesses that are not in thriving cities are suffering.

“London is going to be particularly hard hit because property prices have continued to rise. Those who are already paying high rent simply wont be able to meet this – it’s impossible.”

Winterson said the character of London’s streets was at risk of changing for ever.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re in Marylebone or Spitalfields or round the back of Belgravia, your little newsagents, your dry cleaners, your corner shops and independent bookshops in particular will be hard hit because their turnover isn’t high,” she said.

“It will also make it incredibly difficult for any startup because even if you can rent a space, you’re still going to have to cover the business rate, which is going to cripple you. It’s a real downer on all entrepreneurship and innovation.”

She said the government should consider London as a special case. “It’s drastic. It’s a generational mistake because we’ll never get back in. Once you get the little guys out of the little shops, those premises will never again come back into the hands of sole traders.”

Business rates are a tax that retailers pay on their commercial property. But while they bring in billions for the Treasury – they were the Treasury’s sixth biggest source of income in the last year, bringing in £27.8bn – the tax has been condemned by some retailers who claim it fails to take into account financial performance and is based solely on the value of commercial property and the annual rate of inflation.

Most high street retailers pay more in business rates than they do in corporation tax, leading to criticism that the levy hands an unfair advantage to online-only retailers such as Amazon because they control less property.

Last year, a report by Colliers estate agency said the 2017 rating revaluation would produce the largest changes in rateable value for a generation, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies said the revaluation showed the government’s reliance on London.

Winterson said she and the retail consultant Mary Portas met the business secretary, Greg Clark, last week to discuss the issue.

“The problem is that, as usual, there’s no joined-up thinking in government,” Portas, who called the meeting, said. “I genuinely don’t think they worked out what a catastrophic effect this will have on local communities.

“This will stop any new businesses and entrepreneurs coming on to the market. And we will see small businesses like Jeanette’s close. After the last high street crisis, lots of towns regenerated by a mix of local government and communities coming together to work on creating and sustaining high streets. Sadly all that work will now be threatened.”

The only way to help, Portas said, was for government to freeze the increase until after Brexit.

“Take a good hard look at this dated taxation and renew it as a fit for purpose in today’s retail world,” she said. “And local governments working with their local retailers to give discounts that will keep them going through this really turbulent time.”

Portas tweeted on Monday: “This is short-term business thinking sadly from the govt. waiting to hear from @gregclarkmp and @SadiqKhan.”