The inaugural Jhalak prize for black, Asian and minority ethnic writers (BAME) has been won by Jacob Ross with his “thrilling, visceral and meditative, and always cinematic” crime novel The Bone Readers.

Ross’s winning book shadows Digger, a plainclothes officer working in a rogue police force on the small Caribbean island of Camaho, who can read bones under LED lights. It is the first in a quartet, while also being the British Grenadian writer’s first foray into crime writing: Ross is the author of two short story collections and the acclaimed 2009 novel Pynter Bender.

In her review of The Bone Readers, Bernadine Evaristo praised the author: “Ross’s characters are always powerfully delineated through brilliant visual descriptions, dialogue that trips off the tongue, and keenly observed behaviour... The Bone Readers is a page-turner, but its insights and language are equally testament to a literary novel of impressive depth and acuity.”

Ross saw off a varied shortlist to take the £1,000 prize on Friday night, including Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s children’s book The Girl Of Ink And Stars, Abir Mukherjee’s thriller A Rising Man, Irenosen Okojie’s short-story collection Speak Gigantular, Guardian journalist Gary Younge’s exploration of US gun violence, Another Day In The Death of America and historian David Olusoga’s Black And British: A Forgotten History.

Co-founder of the prize and chair of judges Sunny Singh described The Bones Readers as “not only as an exemplar of the genre but for rising well above it”.

“The book engages - and with a masterly, feather light touch - with history as well as contemporary politics of the Caribbean. Complex issues of memory, identity and, individual and collective sense of self, are stunningly woven into this beautifully written novel. As the first of the Camaho Quartet, it hints at the expanse and scale of the forthcoming books... I know this is a book I shall go back to again and again,” she said.

Fellow judge, poet Musa Okwonga said it was “by turns thrilling, visceral and meditative, and always cinematic”, while author Catherine Johnson added that it “effortlessly draws together the past and the present, gender, politics and the legacy of colonialism in a top quality Caribbean set crime thriller”.

The prize, which was founded to improve the poor representation of BAME writers and funded by an anonymous donor, will run again next year. Two weeks before submissions closed, Singh revealed only 51 books had been submitted by publishers, despite it being open to all genres, forms and self-published writers. After Singh criticised the lack of submissions, particularly by larger publishing houses, as a demonstration of the lack of support for BAME writers in the UK, the prize eventually received 121 entries.

Spider-Man’s nemesis Venom is to appear in his own standalone film, due in cinemas in October next year.

Variety reports that the enemy of Marvel’s web-slinging superhero will be brought to the big screen by Sony Pictures. There’s no word on who will play the sharp-fanged villain, but screenwriters Scott Rosenberg (High Fidelity) and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) will write the script. The film will be released on 5 October.

Venom first appeared in the Spider-Man comics in 1988. An alien symbiote, the creature requires a human host to survive. The character was initially conceived as a supervillain but has since become an antihero in the manner of Deadpool, who appeared in his own film adaptation in 2016.

A Venom movie has long been rumoured. In 2008, Variety reported that a spin-off was in development, with Gary Ross (The Hunger Games) in talks to direct. However, the project stalled. Sony, which now owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, is said to be keen to expand the Spider-Man universe in the same way that Marvel has with The Avengers. Sony has also been interested in making a film featuring a collection of Spider-Man villains in the manner of Suicide Squad.

Meanwhile, Sony is refreshing Spider-Man himself. This summer will see the release of Spider-Man Homecoming, a new reboot starring Tom Holland that will focus on the superhero’s high-school years. Holland is the third actor to don Spider-Man’s red and blue costume in recent years, after Tobey Maguire, who played him in a trilogy of films between 2002-2007, and Andrew Garfield, who appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014).

Venom has appeared in film before. He was the primary antagonist in Spider-Man 3 and made a brief cameo in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Did Donald Trump quote a Nigerian poet, thinking he was reciting an Irish proverb? Sorry to disappoint – but probably not.

Appearing with Irish prime minister Enda Kenny on Thursday, Trump said: “As we stand together with our Irish friends, I’m reminded of that proverb – and this is a good one, this is one I like. I’ve heard it for many many years and I love it.

“Always remember to forget the friends that proved untrue, but never forget to remember those that have stuck by you.”

He added: “A lot of us know that, we know it well. It’s a great phrase.”

Speaking the day before St Patrick’s Day, it’s no wonder Trump decided to pay tribute to Ireland. But this wasn’t a “proverb” anyone from the nation recognised.

Irish tweeters were quick to point out they’d never heard this supposedly famous proverb.

Then, the plot thickened: it turned out the proverb wasn’t a proverb at all – it was a poem. But where exactly did it come from? So far, the source is unclear.

Many on Twitter were thrilled to find the poem seemed to have been written by Nigerian poet Albashir Adam Alhassan. The poem appears under his name on PoemHunter, a website which collects famous poems as well as those submitted by users. Alhassan’s was submitted on 22 January 2013.

But this poem is all over the place. And we’re not just talking random websites festooned with shamrocks and more Irish stereotypes than an Ed Sheeran track. It appears in many motivational and quote collection books.

It’s on page 388 of Crystal Inspirations by Joanne Tuttle, published in 2012. It appears on page 325 of the Speaker’s Quote Book by Roy B Zuck, published in 1997.

The earliest appearance, at least as far as Google Books is concerned, is in volume 31 of the International Stereotypers’ and Electrotypers’ Union Journal, published in 1936 in America.

So how exactly did a poem, whose author we know nothing about, end up being quoted by the president of the United States as an Irish proverb?

Cody Keenan, a speechwriter for Obama, may have hit on the most likely theory:

And indeed, when you google “famous Irish proverb” the poem is included in the top two sites.

So, long story short: the proverb isn’t a proverb, it’s a poem. It’s probably not Irish, given no one in Ireland seems to have heard of it, but we’re not sure where it came from.

A novel inspired by childhood travels to the volcanic island of La Gomera and the traditional stories of the Canary islands has scooped the Waterstones children’s book prize for a 27-year-old poet and playwright.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s debut The Girl of Ink and Stars was named overall winner of the prestigious award by children’s laureate Chris Riddell at a ceremony in the bookselling chain’s flagship store in London’s Piccadilly.

Influenced by Philip Pullman’s The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, the book was described by Waterstones managing director James Daunt as “wonderful”. “It’s a story that’s quite timeless, and I expect people will be reading it in years to come,” he said.

The book tells the story of cartographer’s daughter Isabella Riosse. She lives on the island of Joya, which is reigned over by a strict governor. When her best friend Lupa disappears into a forbidden forest, she volunteers to find her using the island’s myths and the maps given to her by her father.

An award-winning poet, Millwood Hargrave is a graduate of Cambridge and Oxford and was a Barbican Young Poet. Daunt said The Girl of Ink and Stars represented the “heart” of the chain’s mission, which is to promote “good, old-fashioned storytelling”.

Judge Florentyna Martin, who is Waterstones’ buyer for children’s books, described the novel as a joy to read. “It is always exciting when we see this level of outstanding talent in a new writer, and Kiran has crafted a mesmerising world full of myths, magic and adventure that evokes an atmosphere akin to Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” she said.

The £5,000 prize champions new and emerging talent in children’s writing and is unique in that it is voted for solely by booksellers. The Girl of Ink and Stars beat strong competition for the overall award from Lizzy Stewart’s There’s a Tiger in the Garden, which won the category for illustrated books, and Orangeboy by Patrice Lawrence, which took the prize for older fiction.

Stewart’s book was praised by Martin as “bold, bright and beautiful” picture book that “leaps off the page”. Lawrence’s debut Orangeboy was praised for its truthful and gripping storytelling, as well as its “rounded, believable teen characters”.

Daunt said the three books showed that the trend for children’s books by celebrities had not pushed other writers out of the market. He was relaxed about the use of ghostwriters to produce books branded under the names of TV, sports and reality stars. “Ultimately the quality of the book will out,” he said. “If a celebrity brings people into a bookshop and brings people into reading books, it is all for the good.”

He did add a caveat, however. “If a celebrity is producing tosh, then readers won’t come back for another one. It’s like bad TV, bad films or bad anything. The only thing that really works is quality.”

A controversial document in which the playwright Christopher Marlowe reportedly declared that Christ was gay, that the only purpose of religion was to intimidate people, and that “all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools” is to go on show online for the first time.

The so-called “Baines note”, a star item in the British Library’s Renaissance manuscript collection, offers tantalising evidence about the private life of Marlowe, one of the most scandalous and magnetic figures of the Elizabeth period.

Compiled in May 1593 by the police informant and part-time spy Richard Baines, it claims to record a conversation between the two men in which the playwright airs a long list of what Baines describes as “monstrous opinions”.

Among them, Marlowe casts doubt on the existence of God, claims that the New Testament was so “filthily written” that he himself could do a better job, and makes the eyebrow-raising assertion that the Christian communion would be more satisfying if it were smoked “in a tobacco pipe”.

Baines added a personal note, apparently aimed at watching government officials: “All men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped.” A few days later, Marlowe was stabbed to death in Deptford, south London, in circumstances still regarded as suspicious.

The document has been in the collection at the British Library since its founding in 1753 and has often been consulted by scholars, but this is the first time the public will be able to examine it in detail.

Curator Andrea Varney told the Guardian: “There’s nothing quite like being able to look at the real thing, and this will let students and readers from all over the world get close to Baines’s original report. The manuscript itself is over 400 years old and fragile, so digitisation really helps.”

The document and accompanying transcript are being made public in the latest phase of the British Library’s Discovering Literature project, aimed at students, teachers and the general public. Some 2,000 documents are now online, accompanied by 370 background essays and other resources. Four million visitors have visited the site since its launch in 2014.

One of the biggest attractions to date has been a late 16th-century play text calling for tolerance towards refugees. It is seemingly in the handwriting of a man even more famous than Marlowe, albeit somewhat better behaved – William Shakespeare.

In the centuries since his violent death, Marlowe has been celebrated as gay icon whose works explored the realities of homosexual desire while it was still deeply dangerous to do so. Alongside the Baines note, the British Library has uploaded scans of the director Derek Jarman’s notebooks for his avant-garde film of Marlowe’s Edward II (1991). The play focuses on Edward’s love for his favourite male companion, Piers Gaveston; Jarman’s take on the story is nakedly political, featuring references to contemporary battles over gay rights.

The library is also making available resources on other contemporary writers, among them Ben Jonson and the poets John Donne and Emilia Lanier.

Varney said: “So often we focus only on Shakespeare, but there are a whole world of other people out there, many of them just as brilliant. It’s about opening a window on that.”

The Baines document itself is highly contentious, with some scholars arguing that Baines was a fantasist, and that his “note” was a put-up job designed to get Marlowe, who was arrested at almost exactly the same time, in even more trouble with the authorities.

Charles Nicholl, whose 1992 book The Reckoning examines the shady circumstances surrounding the playwright’s death, said: “The one thing you can say for certain about it is that the note was designed to incriminate Marlowe. These are pretty dangerous and wild utterances that he is making.”

Nonetheless, Nicholl added, the document has a rare power: “It does sound like Marlowe; it’s almost as if he walked into the room. After all this time, that’s still rather shocking.”

• The documents are available at bl.uk/discovering-literature
  

Naomi Alderman is the only novelist to make it on to the longlist for the 2017 Orwell prize for outstanding political writing, in a year when George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is once again troubling the bestseller lists.

Alderman’s The Power heads a 14-strong list of books that span anthropology, politics, memoir and history for an accolade considered Britain’s most prestigious for political writing, which comes with a cash award of £3,000. Described as The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale, Alderman’s dystopian novel examines the roots and impact of misogyny by reversing the gender roles in a future society ruled by women. The novel has also been longlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s prize for women’s fiction, and shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust science writing prize.

No overall theme emerges from the longlist, which includes four books by women. Helen Pearson, whose The Life Project is an account of the UK’s pioneering cohort studies run since 1946, is listed beside Somali FGM campaigner Hibo Wardere for her memoir Cut, co-written with Anna Wharton. Irish revisionist historian Ruth Dudley Edwards is longlisted for The Seven, one of four of history books on the list. It tells the story of the seven founding fathers of the Irish state.

Other history books on the list are Easternisation, by the chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman – the winner of the Orwell prize for political journalism last year – who documents the shift of global power to Asia; John Bew’s biography of the postwar Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem; along with And The Sun Shines Now, a vivid account by Hillsborough survivor Adrian Tempany of the football disaster’s impact on the game and wider society.

Joining them on the longlist is Black and British: A Forgotten History, David Olusoga’s landmark history of Britain’s black community, which has also been shortlisted for the inaugural Jhalak prize for writers of colour.

Fellow Jhalak nominee and Guardian editor-at-large Gary Younge is also longlisted for Another Day in the Death of America, which documents the lives of 10 people killed by guns in the US on 23 November 2013. Author Gillian Slovo described the book as “a gripping account of the conditions that turn so many of America’s powerless into victims”.

Hisham Matar, the Libyan writer who was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction, is again nominated with The Return, his account of his father’s kidnapping at the hands of Muammar Gaddafi’s government.

More recent politics is also documented in the books All Out War, Tim Shipman’s account of the 2016 EU referendum; Island Story, Londoner JD Taylor’s story of biking around Britain to discover other sides to UK identity; Enough Said, a look at the evolution of political language by the former BBC director-general Mark Thompson; and The Marches by Rory Stewart, Tory MP and son of a spy, who reflects on his relationship with his father and its political contexts as he walks along Hadrian’s Wall.

Announcing the longlist, the judges – Financial Times comment editor Jonathan Derbyshire, playwright and author Bonnie Greer, writer and broadcaster Mark Lawson and critic Erica Wagner – praised the list for offering “a clear and calm perspective on Britain and its place in the world”.

“The books reflect many aspects of Orwell’s literary character and interests: fiction, journalism, football, language and landscape,” the judges added.

The shortlist will be announced on 15 May, with a winner revealed at a ceremony during University College London’s festival of culture on 8 June.

The Orwell Prize for Books 2017 longlist

The Power by Naomi Alderman (Viking)

Citizen Clem by John Bew (Quercus)

The Seven by Ruth Dudley Edwards (Oneworld)

The Return by Hisham Matar (Viking)

Black and British by David Olusoga (Macmillan)

The Life Project by Helen Pearson (Allen Lane)

Easternisation by Gideon Rachman (The Bodley Head)

All Out War by Tim Shipman (William Collins, Harper Collins UK)

The Marches by Rory Stewart (Vintage, Jonathan Cape)

Island Story by JD Taylor (Repeater)

And the Sun Shines Now by Adrian Tempany (Faber & Faber)

Enough Said by Mark Thompson (The Bodley Head)

Cut by Hibo Wardere, in collaboration with Anna Wharton (Simon & Schuster)

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge (Guardian Faber)

The author of one of the most notorious books of the last century died of a heart attack – six months ago. William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook was used by Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in 1995 and the Columbine high school killers in 1999. His death has become public after it was noted in the closing credits of a new documentary about his life.

The writer suffered a fatal heart attack while on holiday with his family in Nova Scotia on 11 July, at the age of 66. Though news of his death was announced to the Facebook group for his charity, the family did not contact the media. News filtered out at the US theatrical release of documentary American Anarchist, which mentions his death as the film closes.

A manual filled with diagrams and recipes about how to make weapons from bombs to homemade guns and even how to convert a shotgun into a rocket launcher, The Anarchist Cookbook was inspired by Powell’s rage at the presidency of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war.

As an angry teenager in 1969, he used the New York Public Library to research and the book included instructions for illegal practices including breaking into telephone networks and making LSD. The book went on to sell more than 2m copies.

Though publication was suppressed in some countries, the book is available online and has been associated with a number of terrorist attacks and school shootings, the last being in 2013 when shooter Karl Pierson killed a classmate and then himself in a high school in Denver, Colorado. Friends later said he had been sharing the book with others for years.

Following the attack, Powell called for the book to be taken out of circulation. Writing in the Guardian, he revealed that he no longer held the copyright for the book and had been wrangling with its publisher to take it out of print. “Over the years, I have come to understand that the basic premise behind the Cookbook is profoundly flawed,” he wrote. Describing the anger that he felt at the time of writing as blinding him to the “illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence”, he added: “I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led to US military involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq. The irony is not lost on me.”

His comments were in stark contrast with those in 1971, when he wrote: “I detest symbolic protest, as it is an outcry of weak, middle-of-the-road, liberal eunuchs. If an individual feels strongly enough about something to do something about it, then he shouldn’t prostitute himself by doing something symbolic. He should get out and do something real.”

In 1976, Powell converted to Christianity and began his fight to have the book removed from circulation, but the copyright was in the name of the publisher Lyle Stuart. The latest version of the book, from Snowball Publishing, is reported to have been heavily edited.

As an adult, Powell turned to teaching in Africa and Asia, working with schools around the world to support children with learning challenges. In 2010, he and his wife founded the Next Frontier: Inclusion, a nonprofit organisation aimed at helping children with special educational needs including dyslexia, ADHD and autism.

Of the book’s involvement with school killings, he said: “I do not know the influence the book may have had on the thinking of the perpetrators of these attacks, but I cannot imagine that it was positive. The continued publication of the Cookbook serves no purpose other than a commercial one for the publisher. It should quickly and quietly go out of print.”

Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever Booker-prize winning author, has sold the rights to her third novel, a psychological thriller set in rural New Zealand where super-rich foreigners face off with ragtag locals on the eve of a global catastrophe.

According to Catton’s agent, Caroline Dawnay, the novel, entitled Birnam Wood (a reference to a scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is set in a remote part of the country where the mega-wealthy have stored caches of weapons in fortress-like homes in preparation for disaster.

Described as a “psychological thriller”, the novel follows the guerrilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a group of quarrelling leftists who move about the country cultivating other people’s land.

Their chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events which questions, ultimately, how far each of us would go to ensure our own survival – and at what cost.

The planned new novel will showcase a change in style for Auckland-based Catton, and will be less than half the size of The Luminaries at 80,000-100,000 words.

Catton, 31, won the Booker Prize for The Luminaries, an epic historical saga set during the New Zealand gold rush, in 2013.

Fergus Barrowman, publisher of Victoria University Press in Wellington said a six-figure advance was signed with Catton over the weekend - the largest sum he has ever paid for the work of a New Zealand author.

Catton has also signed again with Granta to distribute UK and Australian rights, McClelland & Stewart for Canadian rights, and FSG for US rights.

Barrowman signed the deal after reading a 20-page outline of Catton’s planned novel, and called the plot “archetypal” and “pacy”.

“Ellie told me a while ago she was reading Lee Child and I see that in there, but also with all of her imagination and ethical concerns and ability to conjure up magic,” he said.

“I have total confidence in her as a writer and a person and the book she is going to write.”

The proposed plot of Catton’s book comes on the back of a series of high-profile news articles detailing the plans of billionaire Americans who have purchased bolt-holes in New Zealand.

The controversial purchase of a prime piece of South Island land overlooking Lake Wanaka by Trump advisor and Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel also generated heated debate in the country, when it was revealed Thiel bypassed the overseas investment office approval for the sale by gaining New Zealand citizenship in 2011, despite not meeting the regular requirements.

Barrowman said Catton was “dismayed” by the Brexit referendum and Trump’s presidential win, but the themes of her new novel were ideas and concerns he had heard her discuss “for a couple of years”.

“I don’t know how long or where the specifics of her inspiration emerged from but I can see the concerns and the themes in the outline going back to things that I have heard her talk about for a couple of years now,” said Barrowman.

“I have read the recent press stories and noticed myself as a publisher how the best writers and especially the younger writers are plugging into these concerns. Someone has coined a new term for this fiction, Cli-Fi, for climate fiction.”

Since winning the booker Catton has taken a hiatus from writing, and revealed she suffered months of depression in 2015, in which she found herself unable to leave the house.

At the end of last year Catton told Paperboy magazine that she’d been reading a lot of dictionaries and encyclopedias to learn about more “practical things” - including knot-tying techniques and how to build a raft, in preparation for a novel set in the “immediate future”.

“I’m thinking about writing something set in the immediate future, actually, I’ve been thinking in that way for a long time,” she told the magazine.

“I often think about how reliant I am as a person on technological apparatus, which means I never actually have to know how to do anything. So reading these homesteading manuals is quite interesting. I was just learning yesterday, for instance, how to cure olives using lye to remove the tannins. I never knew that.”

“I find survivalists very tiresome. I think there is a lot of misanthropy in a lot of environmentalism that I find really grates on me. I don’t like the stance that human beings are evil, and this kind of arrogance that you’re going to be the one who survives, and lord it over all the stupid people.”

A BBC adaption of The Luminaries written by Catton is due to begin filming on the West Coast of New Zealand this year.

A “funny and serious, humane and consciousness-raising” poetry collection that reports from the “frontline of motherhood” has scooped the prestigious Ted Hughes poetry award for new work in poetry.

YouTuber Hollie McNish beat six other shortlisted poets to the £5,000 prize with her third collection, Nobody Told Me. The collection combines poems and diary entries in a revealing memoir that follows her from when she discovered she was pregnant seven years ago, to when her daughter turned three years old. The prize, which is administered by the Poetry Society, was presented by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.

Singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams, who judged the prize with poets Jo Bell and Bernard O’Donoghue, said the book “should be sold alongside Caitlin Moran and Bill Bryson. Honest and insightful, it will resonate outside the poetry world to reach a new generation of poetry readers.”

The collection covers all aspects of motherhood, challenging taboos about post-pregnancy sex and breastfeeding as well as the sense of isolation and loss many women feel after giving birth. It also celebrates the joys of having a young child. On publication, the Guardian wrote that “her poems can often sound like love letters to her daughter and each phase of babyhood”.

The Cambridge graduate has earned a reputation for breaking new ground with poetry and performances that straddle the literary and pop scenes. As well as becoming the first poet to record an album at Abbey Road, McNish has collaborated with rapper George the Poet and Kate Tempest, who won the Ted Hughes award in 2012. Her YouTube videos have been viewed more than four million times.

Speaking to the Guardian about the collection in 2016, McNish said the poems were in part about addressing the “stigma attached to writing about things related to women in poetry”. She added: “It just shocked me how hard certain things are as soon as you become pregnant – and yet no one talks about it.”

Other shortlisted work included novelist and poet Will Eaves’s The Inevitable Gift, Salena Godden’s LIVEwire and Caroline Smith’s The Immigration Handbook to win the award. Established in 2009 by Carol Ann Duffy, the prize is funded with the annual honorarium traditionally paid to the laureate by the Queen. Previous winners include David Morley, Andrew Motion and Alice Oswald.

The first trailer for the latest version of Stephen King’s It has landed, suggesting that yet another generation of children will be haunted by visions of an evil, sewer-dwelling clown.

It’s the first of a proposed two-part adaptation of the 1986 novel that was originally turned into a mini-series in 1990, starring Tim Curry as Pennywise, a clown that kidnaps and eats children.

The process of adapting the novel again has proved somewhat torturous, going back to 2012 when it was officially announced. Beasts of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga was initially attached but dropped out, although he now shares a credit on the script. The Revenant star Will Poulter was also attached to play Pennywise but dropped out after the schedule changed.

Mama director Andrés Muschietti is now behind the project, the first part of which is officially called It: Part 1 – The Losers’ Club, and Hemlock Grove star Bill Skarsgård is playing the evil clown.

It’s one of a number of high-profile King adaptations on the way with The Dark Tower, starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, also releasing this year.

It will haunt cinemas from 8 September.

Bob Dylan, it seems, is not a man to be rushed. Almost five months after he was named the winner of the Nobel prize for literature, the singer will finally accept the award when he travels to Sweden this weekend.

His trip brings to a close a long-running saga that began in October when Dylan was named the winner for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. For weeks after, the singer refused to publicly acknowledge the honour or even answer the phone calls from the Swedish Nobel academy.

The 75-year-old eventually told an interviewer that being given the Nobel was “amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?”

He did not attend December’s prizegiving, but in a speech read out by the US ambassador to Sweden said he was stunned and surprised when he was told he had won because he had never stopped to consider whether his songs were literature.

“If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon,” Dylan wrote.

Patti Smith also performed a specially arranged version of his beloved song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

Dylan’s touring schedule had long been due to bring him to Sweden this weekend, but until Wednesday he had remained silent over whether he would be picking up his SEK8m (€839,000, £726,000) winnings and delivering his Nobel lecture, which he must do by 10 June if he wants to keep the money.

Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said recently: “As far as the Swedish Academy is concerned, it is, in any event, clear that the 2016 Nobel prize laureate in literature is Bob Dylan and no one else.”

But in a new blog posted on Wednesday, Danius wrote: “The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend.

“The academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel prize in literature.”

She said the ceremony would be “small and intimate” with no media present, adding: “Only Bob Dylan and members of the academy will attend, all according to Dylan’s wishes.”

Dylan will also send the Nobel academy a taped version of his lecture, rather than giving it in person. Danius said that this occurred “now and again”, and last happened with Alice Munro in 2013.

She added that the Nobel academy were all looking forward to Dylan’s concerts in Stockholm and had a group outing planned to “show up at one of the performances”.

Spanning human origins, national health services, microbial life forms and death, the shortlist for the 2017 Wellcome Book prize has been hailed as one that will “shift perceptions” by chair Val McDermid.

Announcing the six books in contention for the award, which pits fiction against non-fiction, McDermid told the Guardian: “The key thing about these books is that they draw people in to something they otherwise might find a bit scary to read about. There will be people who read one of the books on this list and it will change their lives.”

This year could also see the first posthumous winner of the £30,000 prize, if it goes to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. Kalanithi was training to be a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and wrote this memoir in his final months. Since publication it has won a host of fans, including Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, who wrote in a blog: “I’m usually not one for tear-jerkers about death and dying … But this book definitely earned my admiration – and tears.”

Two novels are in contention for the award, which is to books that deal with medicine, health or illness. In Sarah Moss’s The Tidal Zone, a family navigates the NHS as it comes to terms with a child’s unexplained illness, while in the first translated work to be shortlisted, Mend the Living, Maylis de Kerangal tells the story of a heart transplant, centred on the organ donor and his family. Both books, the judges said, “celebrate and interrogate” the intricacies of modern-day healthcare systems.

One debut features on the list: Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, which explores the 40 trillion microbes in the human body, and how they affect us and offer a key to understanding life on Earth.

Moss has been shortlisted for the prize before, in 2015, as has Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is nominated again this year for The Gene. His book interweaves a narrative about the relevance of genetics and altering the human genome with the story of the reoccurring mental illness that have affected Mukherjee’s own family. McDermid said the human scale of the book helped convey complex issues to a non-specialist audience: “One of the ways we communicate is to bring things down to a human level and it’s important for science is to communicate to non-scientists.”

Also on the list is How to Survive a Plague, David France’s exploration of the 1980s Aids epidemic and the bravery of activists who fought for accessible and effective treatments, many of whom while facing their own struggles with HIV and Aids-related illnesses. “His book deals with the power of patient advocacy in a way that we have never seen before, even though it is only recent history,” McDermid said.

Joining her to judge the prize were Cambridge professors Simon Baron-Cohen and Tim Lewens, broadcaster Gemma Cairney and radio producer Di Speirs. Past winners include Suzanne O’Sullivan’s It’s All In Your Head and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The winner of the 2017 award will announced on 24 April.

The full 2017 Wellcome book prize shortlist is:

How to Survive a Plague by David France (USA) Picador, Pan Macmillan

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (USA), The Bodley Head, Penguin Random House

Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal (France) and translated by Jessica Moore, MacLehose Press

The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss (UK), Granta Books

The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee (USA), The Bodley Head, Penguin Random House

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong (UK), The Bodley Head, Penguin Random House

Sebastian Barry and Francis Spufford are to replay their battle for the Costa book of the year award after both were shortlisted for the 2017 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. The two feature on a shortlist that pits high-profile authors against virtual unknowns in what the judges described as one of the best years they have seen for the £25,000 award.

Barry’s Costa-winning Days Without End and Spufford’s fiction debut Golden Hill will be strong contenders for the award, which was set up in 2010. Both are set in the US, with Spufford portraying 18th-century Manhattan in what the Guardian described as “a frolicsome first novel”. Barry’s novel unfolds a century later amid the carnage of the civil war and was praised by judges as pulsing with “courage, loyalty and, amid the horrors, grace. This is a living novel.”

The two authors head a shortlist that also includes an Orange prize winner – Rose Tremain - and a Man Booker winner - Graham Swift, whose Mothering Sunday charts the journey of housemaid and orphan Jane Fairchild’s journey from servitude to independence.

Four women were shortlisted, in striking contrast to last year, when only one woman made the cut. Tremain leads the way with the Baileys-longlisted The Gustav Sonata, which is set in Switzerland during and after the second world war and was described by judges as “by turns cold and bleak, life-affirming and always very beautifully written”.

The three other books by women in contention are Jo Baker’s A Country Road, A Tree, Charlotte Hobson’s Russian revolution drama The Vanishing Futurist and Hannah Kent’s The Good People, set in rural Ireland in the 1820s. A Country Road, A Tree is a dramatisation of Samuel Beckett’s experiences in France as part of the resistance during the second world war. The judges praised the book’s “quiet, lyrical beauty”.

Baker said she was inspired to write the book after learning about Beckett’s escape on foot from Paris after he was betrayed to the Nazis. “I had this image of him as a Don Quixote character stuck on a donkey, like one of his own characters stuck in a place with sand gathering up around him,” she said. “When I read up about him I realised what extraordinary decisions he had to make and what that revealed of his character.”

In comparison with the other books, Hobson and Kent received relatively few reviews when they were first published, a fact that judge Kate Figes said proved the value of having a longlist selected by a panel of readers rather than professional judges. “There were several books that I hadn’t heard of,” the author said, adding: “These are really strong books that offer some sort of insight into today, some context for what is happening now. That may be why people want to read historical fiction, because we have lost that context.”

Figes is joined on the panel to decide the winner by broadcasters James Naughtie and Elizabeth Buccleuch, as well as writers Katharine Grant and Elizabeth Laird, the Abbotsford trust’s James Holloway, with historian Alistair Moffat serving as chair. The prize will be announced at the Borders book festival on 17 June.

Public libraries in Liverpool have been saved from closure after the government promised £27m for adult social care in the city – however, the city’s mayor has warned that the decision is a stay of execution, rather than a permanent reprieve for the beleaguered library service.

The £27m injection is Liverpool’s share of an extra £2bn promised last week by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to shore up local councils’ social care provision across the country. Four of the city’s 13 libraries were due to close, with others to be transferred to community groups, under plans aimed at saving £1.6m. Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson said the cuts were needed to plug a £90m hole in the local authority’s budgets over the next three years.

Announcing the reprieve, Anderson said the money meant council reserves could now be redirected to protect all Liverpool’s libraries for the next three years. Describing the money as “a small bit of breathing space” and libraries as “a fundamental building block of lifelong education”, Anderson added: “The fact that we had to look at cutting its services was genuinely heartbreaking and shows the scale of the problem which councils like Liverpool are having to address.”

As a result of the cash injection, the mayor said he had allocated £13m to use in the social care budget. Government cuts in Liverpool have been particularly tough, with the outgoing director of adult social services Samih Kalakeche recently telling the Liverpool Echo that the severity of cuts meant that the city could be entirely without social services within three years.

Liverpool libraries came into the firing line when the council was forced to find money to pay for frontline services following cuts in central government provision. Since 2010, the city has witnessed cuts of £330m, the mayor said, and as a result, by 2020, the council’s budgets would be 68% lower than they were a decade before.

But Anderson warned that the extra government funding for adult social care was a one-off payment and questions remain about what will happen beyond 2020. “I’ll be straining every sinew to maintain the pressure on government to make them understand that this sticking plaster approach is no way to treat our elderly and those who work to care for them,” he added.

Libraries have been in the frontline of a funding crisis caused by ballooning adult social care costs and swingeing cuts to funding imposed by Westminster. In Liverpool, three libraries closed in 2012, with a further four transferred to community organisations, including one which has turned into a “centre for learning, recovery, health and wellbeing” run by Mersey Care, the local NHS foundation trust.

David Storey, the British playwright, screenwriter and Booker prize-winning novelist, has died at the age of 83.

Storey was best known for his visceral debut novel, This Sporting Life (1960), which was based on his experiences as a professional rugby league player. He adapted it for an acclaimed 1963 film starring Richard Harris and directed by Lindsay Anderson, with whom Storey enjoyed a vital creative partnership.

The book begins in the thick of a rugby match – “I had my head to Mellor’s backside, waiting for the ball to come between his legs” – and the protagonist, Arthur Machin, has his front teeth broken on the first page. The scene was directly inspired by an incident when Storey was playing rugby for Leeds as a teenager; he hesitated and another player “came up with a very bloody mouth, not knowing what had happened to his teeth … The guilt induced by that was enormous.”

The son of a miner, Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, and attended the city’s Queen Elizabeth grammar school. He made a name for himself alongside a wave of working-class writers from Yorkshire including Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving) and John Braine (Room at the Top) who shared a similarly frank, realistic approach.

Storey went on to study at the Slade School of Art in London. His second novel, Flight into Camden, traced the story of a miner’s daughter who falls in love with a married teacher and goes to live with him in north London. It won Storey the 1963 Somerset Maugham award. His plays included The Changing Room (1973), which is set over the course of a rugby match, seen from a locker-room perspective. He frequently drew upon his Yorkshire background throughout his later works and won the Booker prize in 1976 for Saville, which follows a mining family from the late 1930s onwards.

Anderson directed Storey’s elegiac 1970 play Home, set in a mental institution, at the Royal Court in London and on Broadway. He also filmed a version for the BBC’s Play for Today strand with the same cast, led by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. The writer and director also collaborated on stage and screen productions of Storey’s In Celebration (1969), starring Alan Bates and Brian Cox. That play – about three brothers reuniting for their parents’ 40th wedding anniversary – was revived in the West End in 2007 with a cast including Orlando Bloom in his stage debut.

Storey’s 1976 play Mother’s Day opened at the Court to poor reviews and became famous for an encounter between the playwright and the critics. “Storey lay in wait for us on our next visit and proceeded to remonstrate,” remembered Michael Billington. “I was singled out for a hearty cuff round the ears, which was reported in the press as if I’d been savagely felled by a blow from Muhammad Ali.”

In recent years, Storey had returned to painting and drawing. An exhibition entitled A Tender Tumult, featuring more than 400 works, was held at the Hepworth in Wakefield in 2016.

Storey’s wife, Barbara Hamilton, died in 2015. A statement from their four children said: “He gave and inspired great love, drew us out and showed us how the world really is.”

Playwrights paid tribute to Storey on Twitter. David Eldridge called him “a giant of postwar theatre” and wrote: “Read him and understand some of what it is to write theatre.” Jack Thorne called him “a master theatrical architect and storyteller … A true true great.” The poet Ian McMillan tweeted that “This Sporting Life spoke directly to the Yorkshire soul”.

Nigerian novelist and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has sought to clarify her position after sparking outrage with comments about transgender women that she made in an interview with Channel 4 News. The author of Half of a Yellow Sun came under attack after she failed to call transgender women “real women” in response to a question.

In the interview, broadcast on 10 March, Adichie said “I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”

In a lengthy post on Facebook on 12 March, the writer, who has campaigned for LGBTQ rights in Nigeria, said she had been shocked by accusations of transphobia and reiterated her support for the rights of trans people.

Though the claim that transgender women are the same as women born female springs from “a need to make trans issues mainstream”, it feels “disingenuous” to take that stance, Adichie wrote. “The intent is a good one but the strategy feels untrue. Diversity does not have to mean division.”

She had intended, in the Channel 4 interview, to highlight the treatment of women, she explains: “Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self – to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.”

Noting that trans women have experienced the privileges of living as a male before transitioning, she added: “Because the truth about societal privilege is that it isn’t about how you feel. (Anti-racist white people still benefit from race privilege in the United States). It is about how the world treats you, about the subtle and not so subtle things that you internalize and absorb.”

Some trans women welcomed Adichie’s clarification. Writing beneath her Facebook post, Marit Stafstrom, who describes herself as transgender, said: “It isn’t transphobic to acknowledge the simple truth that there are differences between women and transwomen. It’s just being sane and real, and I think it’s [a] necessary voice within feminist discourse that shouldn’t be dismissed out-of-hand.”

But the majority of reactions remained hostile. Trans activist Kylie She/her tweeted: “Cis women: Please talk to us trans women, start listening to us and stop speaking for us.” She added: “Well, the world treats all women in varied, often oppressive, ways, because it is believed women are lesser. Applies to trans women too.”

Adichie is the latest feminist to come under fire over definitions of womanhood. Last week Jenni Murray, presenter of Woman’s Hour, was attacked for an article in which she appeared to question the right of transgender women to be considered “real women”. Writing in the Sunday Times magazine, the broadcaster said that she is “not transphobic or anti-trans” and called for respect and protection from bullying and violence equally for “transsexuals, transvestites, gays, lesbians and those of us who hold to the sex and sexual preference assumed at birth”. But the article appeared under the headline: “Jenni Murray: Be trans, be proud – but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’”.

Campaigns director of Stonewall Rachel Cohen condemned Murray’s views. “Trans women have every right to have their identity and experiences respected, too. They are women – just like you and me – and their sense of their gender is as engrained in their identity as yours or mine,” she wrote. “Being trans is not about ‘sex changes’ and clothes – it’s about an innate sense of self.”

Winnie-the-Pooh, Peppa Pig, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and even James and his Giant Peach are feeling the heat in China amid reports of a Communist party crackdown on children’s literature.

With about 220 million under-14s and a rapidly growing middle class, China is home to a potentially massive market for children’s picture books. More than 40,000 children’s books were reportedly published here last year alone.

But with an aggressive Communist party campaign against supposedly hostile western ideas currently underway, foreign storybooks appear to have found themselves in Beijing’s cross hairs.

According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Chinese publishers have received orders that the number of foreign picture books being printed in China must be slashed.

Storybooks from South Korea and Japan now stood almost no chance of published in China, one publishing source told the newspaper, while the supply of books from other countries would be “very limited”.

A second source who is an editor at a state-owned publishing house said Communist party officials had complained that foreign storybooks had caused an intolerable “inflow of ideology” from the west.

“[The government] has deliberately decided to constrain imported books and protect those written by Chinese authors,” the source added.

On Friday, e-commerce giant Alibaba announced it would ban the sale of all foreign publications on Taobao, one of China’s most popular online shopping sites in order “to create a safe and secure online shopping environment to enhance consumer confidence and satisfaction”.

China has struggled for years to stave off the influx of foreign cultural influences and those efforts have intensified since Xi Jinping became the country’s top leader in 2012 vowing to promote what he has called “the China Dream”.

Xi has declared that Chinese universities must become Communist party strongholds while education minister Yuan Guiren has warned that “enemy forces” are attempting to infiltrate hearts and minds on the country’s campuses.

The mainland publishing official told the South China Morning Post the book ban had been passed down orally and was “aimed at making people’s ideas conform with Communist Party dogma”.

There were, however, immediate doubts as to whether Beijing would successful in enforcing the prohibition of children’s books.

“I can’t imagine this restriction to be possible, because its implementation is so difficult, and it also has no benefit whatsoever for the people or the country,” one Chinese editor told the Financial Times.

There are currently six foreign titles on listed in the top-10 best sellers list by Amazon’s Chinese-language website, including Harry Potter and Sam McBratney’s picture book Guess How Much I Love You.

Ian McEwan has clarified remarks he made about Brexit last week in which he was reported as saying that the British referendum reminded him of Nazi Germany.

In a statement issued to the Guardian on Monday, the author insisted that while he deplored the current intolerant and aggressive political climate, he had never suggested that either the British government or those who voted to leave the EU “even faintly” resembled Nazis.

Speaking at a press conference in Barcelona to promote his latest novel, Nutshell, last week, McEwan was questioned about the Brexit vote and its aftermath.

As well as comparing the treatment of the supreme court judges charged with scrutinising the Brexit process to Robespierre’s terror during the French Revolution, he also drew a parallel between the “bullying aspect” of the national Brexit debate and the German plebiscite of 1935.

However, reports of the press conference in newspapers and websites in Spain had suggested McEwan went further. Among the headlines were: “Hasty decisions made through plebiscites remind me of the Third Reich”, “Ian McEwan: Brexit came about through a plebiscite reminiscent of the Third Reich”, and “McEwan sees reflections of the Third Reich and Robespierre’s terror in Brexit”.

According to El País, he said: “Great Britain works on the basis of a parliamentary democracy and not through plebiscites, which remind me of the Third Reich.”

In his statement to the Guardian, the author said his words had been “somewhat garbled” when translated into Catalan and Spanish.

“I do not think for a moment that those who voted to leave the EU, or their representatives, resemble Nazis,” he said. “Nor does our government even faintly resemble the Third Reich.

“Nor do I believe that the voting process itself was anything but an accurate representation of current thinking. However, I did say to the assembled journalists that the phrase ‘enemies of the people’ was one associated with Robespierre and therefore carried an unpleasant association; I did say that the press harrying of some judges of the supreme court was nasty (not Nazi).”

McEwan said he felt the general tone used by those leading the Brexit process had become “intolerant of dissent” and that those who voted to remain in the EU had been let down by their representatives in parliament, “who seem to have been bullied into silence. (Honourable exceptions have been Kenneth Clark and Michael Heseltine)”.

He added: “I did indeed invoke the German plebiscite of 1935 for just that bullying aspect, but not because I think the Brexiters have descended into fascism. I did indeed say that I wished to live in a parliamentary democracy rather than in a country prepared to upend the totality of its public life on the narrow outcome of a referendum – another name for an opinion poll.”

McEwan also said Eurosceptics had never accepted the results of the last occasion when the UK’s membership of the EU was put to a popular vote and had fought to leave the union for decades.

“In a democracy that was always their right,” he said. “It follows that it is the right of those of us who voted to remain to continue to speak for what we believe is in our country’s best interest and not allow ourselves to be cowed into silence.”

The novelist Marian Keyes has revealed how she battled constant suicidal urges at the height of her mental illness.

The Irish writer opened up to Kirsty Young about her struggle with alcoholism and depression on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday.

At her worst – an 18-month period beginning in 2009 – Keyes said she struggled not to harm herself.

She had stopped being able to eat, sleep and interact with others, and was eventually hospitalised.

“Then the suicidal impulses started and it was very hard to physically to stop myself from going through with it,” she said. “For months and months, every day was an enormous effort not to do the acts of wounding myself.”

Her recovery was “really speedy”, but the experience altered her perception of what it meant to be depressed.

“Nothing worked but the passage of time … It’s an illness and it ran its course.

“I had always described myself as melancholy or depressive but I hadn’t a clue. Anything I had before was a blue day by comparison. This was altered perceptions, a mental illness.”

She wrote her novel The Mercy of Mystery Close in that period. She told the Guardian in 2013 that a scene in which the heroine planned to kill herself in a hotel room was inspired by her own experience.

“I had two goes going out assembling the whole kit and buying paper and Sellotape to write the note,” she said. “The conversation Helen has with the man in the shop, I actually had that, with him asking: ‘What is it you’re proposing to cut?’

“I was absolutely going through who would find me, leaving money for her to apologise … I wasn’t in my right mind.”

Keyes, 53, also told Young about her experience of alcoholism while living in London in her 20s.

“Alcohol was the love of my life. It was my best friend and, in the end, my only friend … I had stopped eating, stopped hoping, I was constantly suicidal. There was only one way it would go. I couldn’t stop drinking and was preparing to go under.”

Writing was her “rope across the abyss”: she wrote her first short story, then a few months later began a rehabilitation program for alcoholism. She has now been sober for more than 20 years.

“It was that primal urge in all of us to stay alive, saying ‘I can give you this, will you live for this?’ It didn’t get me sober but gave me something to hope for.”

Keyes’ debut novel, Watermelon, was published in 1995.

Her 12 novels to date have sold 35m copies worldwide and been published in 33 languages.

Her 13th book, The Break, will be released in the UK and Ireland on 7 September.

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. Hotlines in other countries can be found here

In 1662 the French noblewoman Madame de La Fayette, published anonymously what is thought to be France’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Montpensier. Drawing on her knowledge of history and experience of Louis XIV’s court, de La Fayette penned a short, complicated tale of love, adultery, jealousy and betrayal that ends in tears and tragedy, set a century before, at the time of the wars of religion.

The book was an instant success, even if the critics attacked the then unnamed author of mixing fact and fiction in dubious fashion and slandering historical figures along the way. La Princesse de Montpensier is credited with inspiring Stendhal more than a hundred years later and Eugène Fromentin two centuries on. It is also the stuff of modern-day romantic pot-boilers and soap operas.

Later this year de La Fayette’s work will become the first by a woman to be studied in France’s literature baccalauréat (Bac-L). The absence of female authors in the more than 20 years since the updated exam was introduced in 1995 has been blamed on an “excess of testosterone” in France’s curriculum.

The syllabus committee could have chosen any number of distinguished French women writers: Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand, Louise Labé and Colette to name a few. Instead it chose a woman whose name will be largely unknown outside of her homeland, except to students of French literature and fans of French cinema; the book was turned into a romping costume drama by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier in 2010.

Madame de La Fayette was born Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne in 1634 to a family of minor nobles who frequented the circle of Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister. Introduced into society by her widowed mother, who was the daughter of Louis XIII’s doctor, the young Marie-Madeleine was not impressed at attempts to match-make. Aged 19, she wrote to her friend, the historian and writer Gilles Ménage: “I’m utterly convinced that love is something inconvenient and I’m overjoyed that my friends and I are exempt from it.”

Two years later she married the Comte de La Fayette, by all accounts a self-effacing man who preferred his family’s country homes to the royal court in Paris. Having produced two sons, the couple spent most of their subsequent time apart. This marital separation would become a leitmotif of de La Fayette’s novels: a woman bored senseless with a dull husband conducts a secret affair with another.

In a France Culture radio documentary, Laurence Plazenet, a writer and expert in 17th-century French literature at the Sorbonne, said de La Fayette’s “obsession with secrecy” led to friends nicknaming her “Brouillard” (Fog).

“In all her books the secret is an absolutely fascinating theme … a treasure, a means of putting pressure on others, a form of authority. It’s also the only private space that exists. There’s this obsession with secrets, but at the same time all her characters are in a tragic quest for the truth,” Plazenet said.

One of de La Fayette’s personal griefs, Plazenet said, was that she was not considered a classic beauty but was regarded as more intelligent than beautiful. Philippe Sellier, a literature professor at Paris IV university, added that Madame de La Fayette, along with the aristocratic writers Madame de Sévigné and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, formed what he called a “feminine avant-garde”. “They refused to be like most other women,” he told France Culture. “They wanted to excel in all of life’s seductive arts; to be accomplished women with, in addition, what Mademoiselle de Scudéry described as a joyful spirit.

“Some of them refused outright the idea of sexuality, which they viewed as something trivial. For them, the most successful relation between men and women was of a tender friendship.”

De La Fayette had a long and close “friendship” with the Duke of Rochefoucauld, the author of Maximes, whom she allegedly saw every day for 15 years, but the exact nature of the bond with him, unsurprisingly, remains “perfectly enigmatic to us”, said Sellier. “They saw each other every day for 15 years … and we still don’t know exactly what was the nature of their relationship.”

While the older John Milton was writing Paradise Lost and John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress, de La Fayette was writing to friends denying having written the works for which she would become known and which would end up on a baccalauréat syllabus more than 350 years later. From September, final year literature students will study the book and Tavernier’s film in conjunction.

France’s Socialist education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, was said to have personally intervened to have de La Fayette included in the study programme after a 2016 petition set up by French professor Françoise Cahen proposing a number of female writers.

Lamenting the “latent sexism” in the current Bac-L, Cahen wrote that the authors she proposed were “not especially interesting just because they are women, but because they are worth studying for the importance they have brought to literature and society”.

Campaigners are now trying to increase the number of women writers included in the teacher training literature degree; since 1981, only 11 books by women have been included out of about 220 works studied.

The first full trailer for the much-anticipated superhero-team movie Justice League has been released onto the internet.

Directed by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s Zack Snyder, Justice League has been heavily hyped as DC Comics’ answer to Marvel’s The Avengers, which provided a gateway into multiple character spin-off movies and allowed its superhero “universe” to mushroom. Justice League features the likes of Batman, Aquaman and Wonder Woman, and is due to be followed by films giving each character solo outings. Wonder Woman, released in June, stars Gal Gadot, while Aquaman should be arriving in December 2018. The Batman has been beset by well-publicised production troubles, and is not likely to start shooting until next year.

Warner Bros set the trailer up with a series of short teasers, released on Thursday and Friday, that featured the likes of Batman, Aquaman and Wonder Woman in brief 15-second clips. This follows over two minutes of specially prepared footage from the film that was debuted at the Comic Con festival in July.

Justice League is released on 16 November in Australia and 17 November in the US and UK.

Set up to reward “brave, bold and brilliant” small presses for taking risks on “niche fiction”, the inaugural Republic of Consciousness prize has been won by Fitzcarraldo for publishing Counternarratives by John Keene.

Fitzcarraldo, a London-based independent established in 2014, published Keene’s experimental collection of 13 stories and novellas last year. The American writer’s book was the unanimous choice of the six judges, who deemed it a “once in a generation achievement for short-form fiction” and praised its “subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose”.

The Republic of Consciousness prize was set up by novelist Neil Griffiths last year to recognise the work of small publishers who take financial risks in publishing challenging and experimental fiction. The prize – unlike many larger awards – did not charge publishers an entry fee, in order to include presses that would not usually step forward. Earlier this year, several literary agents and publishing figures told the Guardian that independent publishers willing to take risks on “difficult” works were unable to access the commercial benefits of being listed for awards because of prohibitive entry costs.

At a ceremony at Fyvie Hall in London on Thursday night, Fitzcarraldo received the £3,000 top prize. The other shortlisted presses and books – Tramp Press for Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones, And Other Stories for Anakana Schofield’s novel Martin John, and Galley Beggar for Paul Stanbridge’s Forbidden Line – will each receive £1,000. Griffiths said that he hoped the publishers will give a third of the prize to their winning book’s author.

Griffiths raised the prize money by donating £3,000 of his own money, with a further £4,000 raised by donations and an online raffle. “Yes, we are spreading £6,000 between four publishers – but for some of them, that is a print run,” he said. “That is a big deal.”

Griffiths praised the willingness of small presses to take risks on experimental debuts, like A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride – which took nine years to find a publisher, before being picked up by Galley Beggar and winning the 2014 Baileys prize – and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, which was initially published to great acclaim by The Stinging Fly in Ireland and Fitzcarraldo in the UK, before being picked up by Penguin Random House in America last year. “Compared with the marketing weight the big publishing houses have, the small presses are still struggling for that shop window,” he said. “The liveliness of publishing requires high-end commercial novels and niche novels, even if they don’t sell millions.”

He said the prize would continue to promote the work of small presses and run again next year, promising to hunt for corporate sponsors to “double, if not triple, the prize fund”.

After a dramatic reveal involving a giant melting block of ice, it’s now been confirmed that season seven of Game of Thrones will premiere on 16 July.

The hit HBO series, which is set to end after season eight, has also been teased via a brief new trailer with dragon graphics and selected lines of dialogue.

Unlike previous 10-episode seasons, the seventh will consist of just seven installments and will be a combination of original stories and elements from creator George RR Martin’s eagerly awaited novels The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.

Details are scarce, but star Emilia Clarke has teased that there will be “another battle that’s epic” to follow on from the Battle of the Bastards.

Showrunner David Benioff has also spoken about the show heading towards its conclusion after the eighth season and what viewers can expect. “The pieces are on the board now,” he said last year. “Some of the pieces have been removed from the board and we are heading toward the endgame. The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new storylines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to do something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We’re definitely heading into the endgame now.”

The new season will reunite surviving cast members but also introduce Oscar winner Jim Broadbent. “I’m a maester, an archmaester,” he said of his role. “I’m an old professor character.”

Once the series concludes, there’s already speculation that it might lead to a spin-off. Last year, HBO’s programming president, Casey Bloys, spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the possibility. “It’s such a big property we would be foolish not to explore it, but it’s a pretty high bar,” he said. “We’ll take some shots at it. I’m not going to do it just to do it. It has to feel very special. I would rather have no sequel and leave it as is than have something we rushed out.”

A controversial talk by a rape survivor and the man who raped her has been moved out of a women’s festival to a standalone event next week following protests.

Icelandic writer Thordis Elva was due to speak at the Women of the World festival at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday with Tom Stranger, who raped her when she was 16.

Following protests against Stranger’s appearance, the event was cancelled while festival organisers consulted the author and her publisher, as well as rape survivor groups and other interested parties.

The rescheduled talk will be held on 14 March. While Stranger will still appear on stage with Elva, the talk will be followed by facilitated group discussions to support anyone whose own memories of sexual assault are triggered by the talk, the organisers said. Support services, including the Samaritans, will also be available for anyone who needs confidential help with the issues raised.

Announcing the decision, Southbank Centre artistic director Jude Kelly said the move was made “to enable as many people as possible to contribute outside a festival context.”

Elva was raped in 1996 by Stranger, an 18-year-old Australian exchange student living in Iceland who was then her boyfriend. Elva contacted him eight years later to tell him how she had been affected. An unlikely email correspondence followed, in which both discussed the impact of the assault. Their correspondence and subsequent meeting formed the basis of a new book by Elva, South of Forgiveness, which includes contributions from Stranger.

The event had been scheduled, Kelly said, after Elva and Stranger’s joint TED talk about the rape. After it was announced, women’s groups and other interested parties criticised the decision to allow a self-confessed rapist to speak at a festival organised to celebrate and inspire women.

Kelly rejected the criticism, saying: “Our WOW festival was created to be an open, balanced platform for discussion and debate on gender equality and the related critical issues that women and men struggle with every day. Rape is one of these critical issues and we need to shift the discourse around it, which too often focuses on rape survivors rather than rape perpetrators.”

Organisations working with survivors of rape and other violent crime welcomed the move. Marina Cantacuzina, founder of the Forgiveness Project, which among other things organises events in which victims and perpetrators talk about the impact of a crime, said it was important to hear Stranger’s story in order to understand why some men rape. “[Thordis and Stranger’s] talk is very well crafted, and he speaks in a way that is really important to hear. So while I don’t agree that he shouldn’t be heard, I do understand how his presence may be triggering,” she said.

However, she questioned the suitability of Southbank Centre for their event. “My main concern has been how appropriate is this as a venue. Perhaps they should have started out with somewhere less high-profile and more intimate,” she added.

While describing Elva as “incredibly brave and inspiring”, Claire Waxman, founder Voice4Victims, warned that the event “could have huge impact on other victims as it could be seen to be minimising rape”. She added: “Ultimately, it’s the survivor’s decision to engage in restorative justice, but I personally wouldn’t advise victims of sexual assault to take this route, and am not sure if such interaction between victim and rapist should be a public spectacle.”

A life-affirming memoir, which began as a project to give hope to her eight-year-old daughter, is to be published this year by novelist Maggie O’Farrell.

The book, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, recounts a series of near-death experiences suffered by O’Farrell. It was written to help her daughter to face life with courage and be aware that “she is not alone”, despite suffering from a severe immunology disorder.

O’Farrell said her daughter had been diagnosed when she was just nine months old with “a quite severe medical condition, including severe eczema and allergies that can cause her anaphylactic shock, which means we have to grapple on a daily basis with life saving treatments for her”.

“I was trying to make sense of what she is going through,” said the Costa prize award-winning writer.

Admitting the memoir “took her by surprise”, she said she had wanted to draw lessons from her own brushes with death. “It began as a private project to explain that life is possible, even in the face of danger, even when you have medical limitations and I wanted to show my daughter that she is not alone,” she added.

The memoir recounts a number of experiences that could have left O’Farrell dead, including a “moment of madness” by the sea, an encounter with a disturbed man on a mountainside and a severe illness in rural China.

It also includes a chapter about an occasion on which she was hospitalised, aged eight, with a rare virus that attacked her brain and left her immobile and incapacitated. At the time, doctors expected her to be permanently disabled. “I talk about when I had severe encephalitis, which left me with neurological problems that I still have to deal with,” she said. “It doesn’t affect me medically, but it does have an impact on me.”

The final chapter talks about her daughter’s illness, how it has affected their relationship, and what it means to care for her. “I’ve asked myself, when she has been very ill, how do you carry on when death is a daily possibility?” the Northern Irish author said.

O’Farrell said her own illness had had a profound impact on her life. “When you have an experience like that at such a young age, it is hard to know what you would have been without it, but I am sure it changed my outlook profoundly,” she said. It had also, she added, taught her “a huge amount of empathy”, as well as a unique insight into the lives of others, which she has used in her work.

“O’Farrell writes with acute perception, paying attention to the smallest details, those everyday moments that imperceptibly heighten an experience,” wrote reviewer Elizabeth Day of The Hand that First Held Mine, which dealt, among other things, with O’Farrell’s disorienting early days of motherhood. Her most recent novel, This Must Be the Place, includes a haunting depiction of the life of a child with severe eczema.

The memoir is written as a series of snapshots, and O’Farrell said she hoped it would “show how an understanding of how fragile we are can push us to seize as much from life as we can”.

She admitted she had felt nervous about publishing a memoir. “One of the reasons I never thought I would write one is that memoirs can be a huge tax on friends and family,” she added. As a result, the focus of the book is firmly on her own experience, with relatives and friends left unnamed.

Before deciding to publish, O’Farrell, who is married to fellow novelist William Sutcliffe, said she checked there would be nothing in it that would create problems for her children. “My husband and I read it very carefully, because I didn’t want anything in there that would be embarrassing to my children,” she added. “There isn’t anything.”

The novelist predicted this would be her only work of non-fiction. “I am certain of that,” she said.

Authors Patrick Gale and Mark Billingham have slammed a government fund to support innovation in public libraries as “a sop, a smokescreen and a whitewash” that does nothing to help the fundamental crisis facing the sector. They were joined by Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon in criticising the ability of the £4m scheme to rescue the beleaguered sector.

Though Billingham welcomed investment in libraries, he said: “It is hard not to view this as a smokescreen – a sop – to those who have long fought the cause of libraries while their funding nationwide continues to be slashed.” Describing himself as increasingly depressed at the state of the sector, Gale told the Guardian: “This is a kind of whitewash and it makes me cross.”

Their comments followed Arts Council England and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport announcing that 30 local authority library services would receive a total of £3.9m from the Libraries Opportunities for Everyone Innovation fund, which was launched in December as part of the government’s libraries taskforce to create a sustainable public libraries service in England.

Recipients of the money include £125,121 for a soft-play facility built around the theme of children’s literature in Greenwich and a state-of-the-art digital and electronic centre to help users of Hull central library explore their creativity in arts, science and technology, which received £50,000. Other recipients of the cash include emergent readers in Norfolk, who will receive £98,020, and £50,000 to trial a whole family “learning hub” in the Wrekin.

Billingham said he was sceptical these schemes could change the fortunes of a sector that has lost £25m through local authority spending cuts in the past year, and where closures are predicted to double over the next 10 years. “A new soft-play area in Eltham does not make up for the closure of an entire library elsewhere, and a little support for emergent readers in one area cannot possibly compensate for the cuts that have robbed entire communities of this opportunity,” he said.

According to Gale, who lives in Cornwall, the plans offer local people little help in combating longstanding issues. “This area has pretty major literacy problems and is one of the most deprived in the country,” he said. “I get fed up that we’ve been given bouncy play areas as if that should make up for the lack of books on shelves.” The failure to invest in opening hours and book stock was compounding problems of generational literacy in an area where the number of illiterate adults was above the national average, he added. “Libraries in Cornwall fill a really important gap for children and adults who want to catch up on reading and can do it in their own way and without feeling judged.”

Simon lent her support to Gale, saying: “Libraries first and foremost need to be open, with professional librarians and well-stocked shelves.” She welcomed the initiatives rewarded by ACE and the DCMS, but added: “They are also window dressing against a background of £180m-worth of funding cuts since 2010 and over 400 libraries closed.”

Crime writer Peter James also welcomed the initiatives, saying it was vital for libraries to move with the times, but he added the schemes should not be seen as an alternative to libraries’ role as beacons of literacy within local communities. “The UK astonishingly and shockingly has one of the lowest literacy levels in the developed world – recently ranking 22 out of 24 countries examined – and the average reading age for 50% of prisoners in our jails is below 10 years old,” he said. “Our libraries are a key to improving these figures for all our futures.”

Library campaigners welcomed support from authors, and added that the focus of government input should be to formulate a coherent national strategy to promote the core activity of libraries – lending books – and provide a long-term blueprint to enable the sector to survive swingeing cuts by councils trying to shore up other frontline services. Pointing to the fact that a third of library users had stopped using the service over the past decade, campaigner Desmond Clarke said: “There is a lack of strategic planning and rigorous assessment as to the effectiveness of projects.”

At the professional librarians body Cilip, chief executive Nick Poole welcomed the money being pumped into individual schemes, but added: “There still remains an urgent need for effective leadership through a fully funded and evidence-based national public library plan for England to provide quality library services that meet the needs of communities.”

In what is believed to be an industry first, the entire text of a book billed as “a practical guide to resisting the rise of totalitarianism” is to be fly-posted along an east London street next week.

US historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, out next week, is to be reproduced chapter by chapter in a series of 20 eye-catching posters pasted along Leonard Street, near Silicon Roundabout. The posters, designed by Vintage creative director Suzanne Dean and her team with students at Kingston University, will appear in sequence on Monday along the road, which is at the heart of the capital’s creative community.

Describing the book as “an attempt to distill what I have learned about the 20th century into a guide for action today”, the Yale professor said: “I can’t think of anything like this that has been done with anyone’s work before.”

He added that it was doubtful such a distillation would have been possible with his previous works, which include Bloodlands and Black Earth, both of which come in at over 400 pages, compared with On Tyranny’s 130.

In the book, the professor, who specialises in European history and the Holocaust, mixes modern history with practical lessons on how to resist tyranny. It was prompted, he said, by the shock and sense of helplessness felt by many over recent political developments in the US and UK. Utilising examples of resistance against Hitler and Stalin, each chapter includes acts of defiance readers can integrate into their daily life.

Snyder intended the book be used as “a manifesto and manual” in the fight against rising populism on both sides of the Atlantic, a situation he described as “urgent”.

“I will be more than happy if the posters themselves convey its message,” he added. “We have become unused to the stakes being high, but they are: those who control the executive branch of the US government want a regime change in my country, and the basic sense of freedom that many of us have come to take for granted in the west is under threat.”

William Smith, creative manager at Snyder’s publisher Vintage, said: “We believe it’s the first time anyone has done this to launch a book.” He said On Tyranny was a book that would get word-of-mouth recommendation, but “you need to get that word-of-mouth going”.

The east London street was chosen because “every other person around there uses Instagram and Twitter”, Smith said. It is expected that photographs of the eye-catching designs – modelled on 1930s propaganda – will be shared on social media.

Though Snyder praised the campaign, he admitted it took time for him to understand how it would work. “Any publication means the transformation of ideas into an object,” he explained. Describing the posters as “in effect a second kind of publication of the book” and its transformation from 20 lessons about tyranny into 20 original pieces of art, he said: “I didn’t grasp that until I saw the wonderful posters. This is not so much the promotion of the book as another realisation of it, free of charge in the public space.”

Was he worried when he didn’t understand it? No, he said: “Marx said that the point is not to understand the world but to change it.”