Bill Cosby’s children’s book series was among the 10 most challenged books in US libraries last year, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

It is the first time Cosby, who was once a symbol for family values in the US, appeared on the ALA’s annual Most Challenged Books list.

Books are usually included on the list because of content, which some readers or parents may deem too sexual, religious or political. But the ALA said Cosby’s Little Bill series was challenged because of “criminal sexual allegations against the author”.

Cosby, 79, was charged with sexual assault in December 2015 after a case filed in 2005 was re-opened due to revelations that Cosby had admitted to giving drugs and alcohol to women before having sex with them. The trial is scheduled to begin in June.

Cosby was first publicly accused of sexual assault in 2000, but ensuing allegations against Cosby failed to significantly impact his reputation until 2014, when comedian Hannibal Buress discussed them during a standup gig that went viral.

Cosby’s first Little Bill book, The Meanest Thing to Say, was published in September 1997. More than a dozen books in the series have been published since and spawned an Emmy award-winning children’s television series that ran from November 1999 to February 2004.

There was a 17% increase in challenges against books compared to 2015, according to the ALA. The group tallied 323 challenges in 2016, which falls below the more than 400 challenges made each year from 2000 to 2009.

The ALA attributed this to increasing self-censorship.

“One of the real issues is that fewer schools have librarians, so they don’t know there’s a thoughtful way to respond to complaints,” James LaRue, who directs the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told the Associated Press. “You also have school librarians saying upfront that they won’t want profanity or sex in the books they acquire.”

The 2016 list included repeat appearances from books Drama by Raina Telgemeier, I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel, Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan, and Looking For Alaska by John Green.

Green’s book topped the list in 2015 for “a sexually explicit scene that may lead a student to ‘sexual experimentation’”. The other three books were challenged for myriad reasons, including that they each portray LGBT characters.

While depictions of sex and LGBT characters racked up the most complaints, Chuck Palahniuk’s Make Something Up distinguished itself by being challenged for being “disgusting and all around offensive”.

Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.

Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers.

Alec Baldwin, whose impersonations of Donald Trump have skewered the thin-skinned US president for the amusement of Saturday Night Live audiences for months now, has proved to have a weak spot: poor editing.

The 59-year-old actor has attacked his publisher HarperCollins, accusing the editors of poor proofreading. In his first post on a Facebook page set up to promote his new autobiography, Nevertheless, he claimed the published edition “contains SEVERAL typos and errors which I was more than a little surprised to see”.

Declaring he would use the Facebook page – originally set up to showcase material that did not make the final edit of the book – as an index of corrections and amendments to the text to bring it in line with his original intent, the 30 Rock star wrote: “The editors at HarperCollins were, I imagine, too busy to do a proper and forensic edit of the material.”

As his first amendment, he offers a clarification to his statement in the memoir that when he wrote in the book that he was “in love” with his female co-stars Megan Mullally, Kate McKinnon and Tina Fey, he was referring to his passion for their talent. The celebrity added: “As a happily married man who wants to stay that way (ahem), I wanted to clarify that.”

Though the actor’s publisher HarperCollins360 declined to comment about the outburst, Baldwin’s fans were forgiving. “The author is not responsible for typos and grammatical errors, folks,” wrote Myra Lawrence, after a slew of critical comments from pro-Trump posters who used Baldwin’s statement as a chance to attack the actor. Lawrence added: “That’s why you hire an editor. Clearly, they did not provide the service for which they were paid.”

Diane Jordan, who published a children’s book five years ago, sympathised with Baldwin. “I was mortified by the editing that did not occur. It is almost impossible to edit a work you have written and rewritten so many times,” she wrote.

Not all the comments were so supportive. YA novelist and producer Jeff Rivera told Baldwin to look closer to home for a culprit. “Having worked with major publishers, they make authors sign off on every single comma change they make in their copyedit before they go to press,” he posted. “So you or someone from your team (whoever reviewed the final draft) did not do their job. Blame them, not the book publisher.”

Despite the typos and errors, the book received decent reviews on release last week. Writing in the Guardian, Fiona Sturges praised Nevertheless for its charm and candour, although after noting a litany of moans about directors, fellow stars and slights, she added: “There’s a moment where, while discussing a series to be fronted by Baldwin, a producer on the cable and satellite network MSNBC puts her finger over her mouth in a shushing motion and says to him, ‘Stop complaining.’ Exactly, you think.”

An exhaustively researched history of pop music’s impact on British political life during the 70s and 80s has won this year’s Penderyn music book prize. Walls Come Tumbling Down won its author Daniel Rachel the £1,000 prize at the Laugharne Weekend music and literature festival in south Wales, the prize’s home since it was first presented in 2015.

Walls Come Tumbling Down, subtitled The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2-Tone and Red Wedge, explores how revulsion at Eric Clapton’s drunken attack on “wogs” and “coons” at a Birmingham gig in 1976 provided the spark for a significant protest movement led by the British music industry.

Telling his audience to vote for Conservative politician Enoch Powell to prevent Britain becoming a “black colony” – after having scored a hit with his cover of Bob Marley’s I Shot the Sheriff – Clapton’s remarks came at a time when the far-right in Britain were gaining power. The incident prompted the beginnings of Rock Against Racism, a grassroots movement in which bands, often multiracial, rallied against prejudice. The campaign helped make racism unacceptable in Britain and eventually went international, with Jerry Dammers’ band the Special AKA recording Free Nelson Mandela; a song that captured global anger at the ANC leader’s imprisonment and was played at rallies by Mandela supporters in South Africa.

Rachel’s book also follows the activities of Red Wedge, a socialist effort led by musicians including Billy Bragg and Paul Weller to rally younger voters to end Margaret Thatcher’s term as prime minister.

At the ceremony on Sunday afternoon, a delighted Rachel said the last time he had won a prize was when he was eight years old. He added: “It was the same day I was inadvertently driven into a National Front march in the middle of Birmingham city centre. That moment was the genesis for Walls Come Tumbling Down, via much skanking to 2 Tone records and a healthy shot of anti-Thatcherite songs from the Red Wedgers to shake up my hardcore Tory upbringing.”

Running to more than 500 pages, Rachel’s book is a verbatim history, patched together from copious interviews. John Harris’s Guardian review praised the book’s “definitive” history, adding: “In an England almost as riven and angry as the place portrayed here, now might be the time to learn from the stories it tells.”

The book was chosen by a judging panel featuring musicians Charlotte Church, Tracey Thorn and Eliza Carthy, alongside Roundhouse director of music Jane Beese, Rough Trade records founder Geoff Travis and comedian Stewart Lee. Lee said Rachel’s was his favourite of the books and one “I think is very important at this moment in time, too”.

Chair of judges and prize founder Richard Thomas described Walls Come Tumbling Down as “a big book of real gravitas”. It beat seven other titles including Brix Smith Start’s memoir The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise, about the US musician’s adventures in British art rock; Stuart Cosgrove’s “personal history of northern soul”, Young Soul Rebels; This Is Grime, Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose’s history of the music genre and how it emerged from London’s East End; and Band singer and Dylan collaborator Robbie Robertson’s memoir Testimony.

As well as his cheque, Rachel also took home an appropriately rock’n’roll bottle of strong liquor, from Welsh malt whisky distiller and prize sponsor Penderyn.

A year ago, the Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan was at the centre of an unexpected storm. Her third book, All the Rivers – about a relationship between a Palestinian artist, Hilmi, and an Israeli woman, Liat – had been selected for the national curriculum. Then, abruptly, it was withdrawn by the education ministry because of its subject matter.

That attempt at censorship – as Rabinyan acknowledges – had its positive aspect. Sales of her novel have doubled since it became a cause célèbre in Israel’s culture wars in January 2016. Now being translated into 20 languages, it was published in the UK last month. And Rabinyan is preparing to set off on a month’s book tour of the US.

Her treatment was of a piece with how the rightwing coalition Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has taken aim at the media and the arts, as well as at documentary makers and critical NGOs it does not like.

While there are things that Rabinyan would rather forget – including the threats she received – the 14 months since the book was rejected from the school curriculum have heightened her perspective, she says. “I still find it overwhelming. I guess the months that have passed since have made me acknowledge the reasons for the banning. It made me look at the current situation in Israel.”

For Rabinyan, that has meant examining how art in Israel has come to be regarded by some as dangerous.

“Art and literature are about a magical appeal to identity and empathy. How an identity in literature is transferred into your own identity so that you care for a fictional stranger so that you get into his skin and wear his gaze. This is what is so powerful. It is an antidote to the armoury we are requested to put on. This shield of ignorance and indifference and apathy. Because if you really sense everything, if you don’t wear this shield, it is painful.”

It is that appeal to empathy, she suggests, that led to her novel being perceived on the right as a threat to modern Israel. Sitting in a cafe in Habima Square, Tel Aviv, Rabinyan recalls the moment she learned that her book was regarded as a subversive, though for her it had a different meaning: the desire to memorialise a Palestine artist whom she had met in New York and who died suddenly.

“I received a call from the reporter on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz who would expose the whole affair. To be honest, we were laughing at first because the reasons given for rejecting the book seemed so absurd. That this book of mine was a threat to the Jewish separate identity. Because it might encourage young readers to get intimately involved with non-Jewish residents of the country,” she says.

But that is precisely how the pedagogical committee of Israel’s education ministry – in a decision supported by the far-right education minister Naftali Bennett – judged the book.

In the written explanation for rejecting her novel, the education ministry official, Dalia Fenig, said: “Intimate relations, and certainly the available option of institutionalising them by marriage and starting a family – even if that does not happen in the story – between Jews and non-Jews, are seen by large portions of society as a threat on the separate identities (of Arabs and Jews).”

The ministry eventually took a small step back, allowing individual teachers to use the book in schools if they wanted to, but for Rabinyan the damage had already been done. The irony, she says, is that those who set themselves against her book fundamentally misunderstood one of its key themes: the fear of the loss of identity.

“Jews, by being exiled, had to preserve their separate identities among the communities that they lived in. They had to have abstract boundaries and this concept of isolation is reflected in the novel. My character, Liat, embodies this fear of being lost. Having her identity swallowed by the loved one. The fact he is a Palestinian and she has this idea of herself – it reflects something important. You can take the girl out of the Middle East but you can’t take the walls of the gate out of the girl. As a reason for not being taught, it was a good irony!”

Rabinyan draws a distinction between identity and the notion of identity summoned up by nationalist politicians, which she describes as being “like a shadow that sinks in”.

While she was writing, she had a book by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on her table. “He teaches us that we can redeem our humanity by not just caring about our own perspective but by seeing details of the other individual in the mass of humans.”

Today, Rabinyan frames the reaction to her novel in terms of a wider campaign by ministers in Netanyahu’s government to target funding and support for arts that do not reflect their right-wing views.

On the day we meet, a new controversy is brewing over funding for film and documentary production, now in the crosshairs of the abrasive culture minister, Miri Regev, after the broadcasting of a new documentary series – Megiddo – following the lives of Palestinian security prisoners.

Rabinyan blames the crackdown on free speech and expression on Netanyahu, comparing his ministers to apprentices. “They are very threatened by perspectives that allow knowing of the other.”

She characterises cultural trends in depressing terms. “It is a very efficient conspiracy to numb elements of the Israeli mind so they are unaware of how much they are being manipulated. How much they serve the motivations and ambitions of politicians who are empowered by that ignorance.”

If the controversy around her book still surprises her, it is because she set out to write something intensely personal. Its genesis was the death in a drowning accident of Hassan Hourani, which prompted Rabinyan to write a long article for the Guardian in 2005.

“I wanted to revive a memory of a person I knew in New York. He was a Palestinian artist whose life was lost a few months after I met him. I felt responsible for being witness to his last month. The novel was an act of rescue. I don’t consider myself to be brave. I feel the need to say I find friendship to be superior to romantic love, especially for individuals from a conflict involving life and death.”

The involvement of education minister Bennettis felt viscerally by Rabinyan. “He is my nemesis. I never felt I would say that … I was at an event and hid behind a curtain so we wouldn’t have to shake hands. But Rabinyan has received support from unexpected places. “I got a letter from Angela Merkel, who had read the German translation. They are such unexpected outcomes. I am banned by an Israeli politician while the German leader is an avid reader.”

Finally, what seems to trouble Rabinyan most is not her own part in the recent culture wars but the cumulative effect of the desire by some of Israel’s political leadership to shutter debate.

The result, she says, is not only the rejection of part of Israel’s present but its future as well. “If you allow only one perspective, you narrow the world. [Then] something is missing for us to interpret our future. Where we are heading.”

Dorit Rabinyan’s All the Rivers is published by Serpentine

A Conservative MP who claimed that a book prize set up to address the lack of diversity in British publishing was discriminatory against white people has had his complaint dismissed.

Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, wrote to the Equality and Human Rights Commission in January, claiming that the Jhalak prize for writers of colour discriminated against white writers.

A spokesman for the EHRC said: “After investigating, we were satisfied that the prize did not breach equality law.” He added: “As the UK’s independent equality regulator, the Commission has a duty to consider complaints by individuals about potential breaches of the Equality Act 2010.”

But one of the founders of the prize, author Sunny Singh, criticised the decision to follow up on Davies’ complaint, claiming it had caused “enormous stress” and wasted resources.

Singh said she was baffled at Davies’ action. “I really cannot understand why an MP for an extraordinary constituency like Shipley would do a thing like this,” she said. “I am heartbroken because I would expect more responsible behaviour and better use of his time from a member of parliament.”

The prize was established in 2016 to reward non-white authors for their work after the 2015 Writing the Future report from Spread the Word found that only 8% of people working in British publishing self-identified as coming from a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) background, creating a cycle where the authors picked up by publishers were also overwhelmingly white. Since the report, several of the UK’s largest publishers have introduced new schemes and mentorship programmes, with chief executive of Penguin Random House UK, Tom Weldon, warning the industry in October that it would “become irrelevant” it did not begin publishing a range of authors that better reflected British society.

Davies said that he had launched the complaint because of his strong opposition to “positive discrimination”. “I don’t believe in any discrimination and don’t believe that we should have prizes and competitions which discriminate on the basis of race,” he said.

In one letter to the EHRC, as well as complaining about the Jhalak, Davies also asked for the equalities regulator to investigate the Fourth Estate/Guardian prize for short stories by writers of colour, which was launched last year. In 2009, he had the Decibel Penguin prize, an Arts Council initiative aimed at writers from Asian, African and Caribbean backgrounds, shut down under race discrimination law.

Davies said: “If someone set up a literary prize for white people only, there would rightly be outrage from the same people who are defending this competition.” He added: “As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between a prize for white people only and a prize for ethnic minorities only. Both discriminate on the grounds of race and both should be rejected.”

Asked if he had complained about literary prizes that select on the bases of gender or sexuality, such as the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, he was unable to answer. “I’m not concerned about literary prizes,” he said. “I am concerned with racial discrimination.” However, in 2008 he complained that the Orange prize, as the Baileys prize was then named, did discriminate against men.

Davies, who has been on the parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee since December, made news recently after the Women’s Equality party announced it would field its leader Sophie Walker against him in the forthcoming general election. The WEP candidate is standing against the sitting MP over what she described as his “anti-equality agenda”, which includes voting against same-sex marriage and for the repeal of the Human Rights Act.

In 2009, it emerged that over an 18-month period Davies had sent the then equalities watchdog head Trevor Phillips 19 letters, with questions ranging from whether the Metropolitan Black Police Association discriminated because it limited membership to black people, to whether anti-discrimination laws ought to be extended “to cover bald people (and perhaps fat people and short people)”.

The inaugural Jhalak prize was won in March by author Jacob Ross and his novel The Bone Readers.

Glenn O’Brien, the New York cultural figure who was an author, musician, magazine editor, style guru, TV host and key figure at Andy Warhol’s Factory, has died aged 70.

Described by Rolling Stone, one of the publications he edited along with Warhol’s Interview, as a “renaissance man”, O’Brien was perhaps best known as the host of TV Party – the public access show on which he interviewed guests, such as Debbie Harry and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

O’Brien had been ill for some time and his wife, Gina Nanni, told ArtNews that he died due to complications related to pneumonia.

His name was synonymous with downtown New York of the late 70s and early 80s, where he worked alongside Andy Warhol at the infamous Factory.

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and went on to study at Georgetown University before making his way to New York where, while studying film-making at Columbia, he became a regular fixture at the Factory.

Writing about his relationship to the work of the photographer Billy Name, a key figure in Warhol’s circle, in the Observer in 2014, he said: “I guess I found my future through Billy Name’s eye. I saw his pictures of the Warhol Factory when I was in college and thought, ‘Oh, that’s the place to get to. Everyone is so beautiful and it looks brilliant and complicated – art, music, film, but most of all a kind of wild life.’” It looked like the future as I imagined it.”

He was an editor at Warhol’s Interview magazine in the early 70s before becoming GQ’s Style Guy. In the role, he wrote about sartorial developments and gave advice in a column.

He also dabbled in punk, writing a long-running and influential column on the New York scene and playing in the group Konelrad, who were regulars at CBGB. He wrote many books, including 2011’s How to Be a Man: A Guide to Style and Behavior for the Modern Gentleman.

Three years after it was born from literary-world frustrations with the Man Booker prize, the Folio prize has returned, with a shortlist that has more than a little in common with other prizes this year.

The Folio prize was created in the wake of the 2011 Man Booker shortlist, when the judges controversially emphasised “readability” and a book’s ability to “zip along”, perceived by some to be at the expense of literary merit. Margaret Atwood deemed it “much needed in a world in which money is increasingly becoming the measure of all things”.

The prize was established with the rule that any English-language writer could be considered, at which point the Booker would not consider writers beyond the Commonwealth. The Booker responded in 2014 by widening its remit to include fiction in English from across the globe, raising questions as to whether there was a need for another prize for literary fiction.

The first Folio was awarded to American short story writer George Saunders, then Indian-American Akhil Sharma in 2015. In 2016, the Folio had a fallow year while organisers found a new sponsor and has now relaunched for 2017, with the backing of investment company Rathbone, and a new criterion to distinguish it from the Booker: allowing nonfiction.

The 2017 shortlist is evenly split between fiction and nonfiction. China Miéville’s fantasy novella This Census-Taker is listed alongside CE Morgan’s “great American novel” The Sport of Kings, Francis Spufford’s historical romp Golden Hill and Madeleine Thien’s story of the aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution, Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

Hisham Matar’s memoir of his missing father, The Return, is listed, as is The Vanishing Man by Observer art critic Laura Cumming, which tells the story of the Spanish artist Velázquez and an English bookseller who thought he had found a lost painting. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s intimate account of her relationship with her transgender partner, is nominated alongside Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami.

The eight finalists were chosen from a list of 62 titles nominated by the Folio Academy, a body of more than 250 writers and critics including Atwood, Peter Carey, AS Byatt, Zadie Smith and JM Coetzee.

Thien’s novel was nominated for the 2016 Man Booker, while Spufford won the Costa first book award and Morgan is in contention for the 2017 Baileys prize. Matar’s The Return was nominated for the Costa biography award and the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction, while Cumming’s The Vanishing Man is nominated for the James Tait Black prize.

Chair Ahdaf Soueif, who is judging alongside fellow authors Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Rachel Holmes, said that the prize stood out from others in being formed by nominations from the Folio Academy, and also for allowing nonfiction. “It is interesting that there is an overlap with other prizes … but it is not surprising,” she said. “It would be lovely to have lots and lots of new books, but it makes sense that there is a fair amount of overlap.”

From the transgender themes of Nelson’s The Argonauts, to the journeys made in Burning Country and The Return, borders could be seen as the common thread throughout the shortlist, said Soueif: “You could make an interesting case. Laura Cumming’s book is all about fudged boundaries between art and life, The Return and Burning Country are very clearly about boundaries … I guess a lot of what these books are doing is considering boundaries, then crossing them.”

The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 24 May at the British Library and will receive a cheque for £20,000.

The 2017 Rathbones Folio prize shortlist

The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus)
The Return by Hisham Matar (Viking)
This Census-Taker by China Miéville (Picador)
The Sport of Kings by CE Morgan (4th Estate)
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Melville House)
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber)
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (Granta)
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami (Pluto Press)

A dating website claims to have discovered what kind of reading preferences make one more attractive to potential partners. According to eHarmony, women who listed The Hunger Games among their favourite books saw the biggest boost to their popularity, while men who read Richard Branson’s business books were approached most often. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was a hit for both genders. But crucially, reading anything is a winning move; men who list reading on their dating profiles receive 19% more messages, and women 3% more.

This welcome news does not come out of the blue. Last year, the dating app My Bae also announced that people who used reading tags on its profiles were more successful in finding dates. More recently, research from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, showed that reading a novel can improve brain function.

Numerous studies have shown that readers have more empathy, including a 2005 University of Toronto paper which found that heavy readers – those who recognised more authors’ names – scored better in the interpersonal reactivity index, an empathy test, and the reading the mind in the eyes test. In general, literary fiction is thought to be most personally improving.

And being a reader can confer even more advantages. In 2015, the Reading Agency charity analysed 51 papers and reports and discovered that reading resulted in benefits including increased empathy, better relationships with others, reduced symptoms of depression and risks of dementia and improved wellbeing throughout life.

So being an avid reader makes you more popular, more successful, happier, sexier and, all in all, a better human being than someone who isn’t. But people who read a lot already knew this.

As Angela Merkel gears up for her third re-election later this year, observers could be forgiven for assuming that the issue which has come to dominate Germany’s image abroad will only play a minor role in the campaign.

A year and a half after the German chancellor and her Austrian counterpart opened borders to thousands of refugees in September 2015, the anti-migrant party Alternative für Deutschland has dropped in the polls to pre-crisis levels.

At last month’s regional elections in Saarland, a state that had voluntarily taken in a larger share of asylum seekers than required, the refugee issue barely registered.

But two books published this spring suggest that Germans are still hungry for answers to what exactly happened in the autumn of 2015.

Robin Alexander’s Die Getriebenen (The Driven Ones), a political non-fiction thriller which reconstructs the backroom deals and rushed decisions behind the headlines, has sold 120,000 copies in less than a month and sits atop the bestseller charts.

It is followed this Friday by Konstantin Richter’s Die Kanzlerin: Eine Fiktion (The Chancellor: A Fiction), the first novel to speculate what may have gone on in the German leader’s mind in that same period.

Even though neither book is unsympathetic to its protagonist – Alexander introduces his work as “neither a tale of sainthood nor villainy” – both propose that the refugee crisis has fundamentally changed the relationship between Germany’s chancellor and her people.

Alexander, a parliamentary correspondent for the broadsheet Die Welt, paints Merkel’s decision to keep open German borders not as the result of either rational planning nor moral righteousness, but tactical blundering and communication failures.

The book suggests that Merkel’s Social Democratic coalition partners had been deliberately goading her into action on the refugee issue because they knew that it represented a political minefield for a conservative chancellor: until autumn 2015, she had spent almost a decade avoiding an official visit to an asylum seekers’ shelter.

In the end, Merkel changes her mind because polling indicates that she has the public mood on her side: a week before the border opening, a poll-of-polls states that up to 93% of the German population think the refugee crisis is the most important issue of the moment.

Yet Alexander’s research also shows that a week later the German government was only a signature away from shutting the borders again, even to asylum seekers. In the end the barriers stayed up, the journalist writes, “not because Merkel or anyone else in government had consciously made a decision that it should. It was simply that in the crucial hours no one stepped forward who wanted to take responsibility for the closure”.

Alexander charts with admiration how quickly a plan made up on the hoof in the chancellory is executed to perfection across the rest of the country. But The Driven Ones remains highly critical of the moral justifications for her decisions that Merkel presented to the public after the event.

Richter’s novel takes a more existential approach. The Chancellor: A Fiction is bookended by Merkel attending performances of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at the Bayreuth festival.

Richter paints a picture of a chancellor tired of her usual trial-and-error approach to politics and worn out by the burden of office. Not without a trace of vanity, the refugee crisis becomes a project of emotional self-discovery.

After visiting a refugee shelter in Heidenau and witnessing for the first time herself the hatred leveled at foreigners, Richter writes, “she legitimised the emotions that she had learnt to ignore by allowing herself to feel with the refugees and making their cause her own”.

Before its official publication, the novel has already won both enthusiastic praise and damning indictment. “Richter’s interpretation will shape the international perspective on Merkel’s late era in the same way that House of Cards did for the Thatcher years and Primary Colours did for the Clintons,” wrote the Hannoversche Allgemeine newspaper.

“Sometimes life writes the best stories,” was the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s verdict, “and the worst ones are written by authors who overestimate their talent”.

Richter, a former Wall Street Journal staff writer who has also written for Politico and the Guardian, said he came up with the idea for his book after cycling past Merkel leaving her inner-city apartment one morning and having to explain her role to his young daughter.

“In my book I tried to portray the refugee crisis as the moment that could have been a defining moment in Merkel’s career, and in the end it wasn’t,” Richter said.

“The way I saw it, Merkel felt the need to come up with a new approach to politics – more brave and more proactive – but couldn’t make it work. And in the end she wasn’t much wiser than at the beginning, only less popular, because the Germans are no longer sure what she is really about. There’s a certain tragicomedy in that.”

Helmut Kohl has been awarded a €1m (£842,875) in damages over an unauthorised biography that a judge said had “deeply violated” the former German chancellor’s personal rights.

Judges in the western city of Cologne ordered the book’s two authors and their publisher to pay the damages to Kohl, 87, for breaching his trust and sullying his reputation.

“This is the highest sum ever awarded by a German court in a right to privacy case,” the city’s district court said in a statement.

The bestselling book, Legacy: the Kohl Protocols, is based on more than 630 hours worth of recorded conversations between Kohl and his former ghostwriter Heribert Schwan, recorded between 2001 and 2002.

The interviews were originally intended to feed into a multi-volume memoir project, which was scrapped partway through, when the politician and his ghostwriter fell out after Schwan published another work in which he seemed to partially blame the ex-chancellor for the suicide of his wife, Hannelore.

Schwan went ahead with the project anyway, quoting a number of embarrassing comments and putdowns. Kohl – who during his 16 years in power steered the country through the final years of the cold war and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall – belittled Mikhail Gorbachev’s political achievements and dismissed other party colleagues as “babies” and “traitors”.

The book, co-written with Tilman Jens, also contained a passage in which Kohl commented on the current German chancellor, a former protege of his, in less than flattering terms: “Ms Merkel couldn’t even hold her fork and knife properly. She loitered at state dinners so that I had to repeatedly tell her to pull herself together.”

The Kohl Protocols was published in 2014, but Kohl had already managed to block its sale, and the reprinting of 116 passages based on confidential conversations – a ruling upheld by the Cologne court on Thursday.

Schwan argued that he had given Kohl the option of switching off the tape recorder when discussing matters he did not want published.

Lawyers for Schwan and Jens as well as the Heyne publishing company, a unit of Random House, said they would appeal against the ruling.

Kohl, described as the father of German reunification, left active politics in 2002. Since a fall in 2008, he has suffered from impaired speech and uses a wheelchair.

The foreign secretary has officially entered the general election campaign in a manner befitting no other politician, by introducing a real head-scratcher.

In a column in the Sun, Boris Johnson referred to the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as a “mutton-headed old mugwump”, leading to much confusion about the meaning of the term and a peculiar kind of fallout just six weeks before the country heads to the polls.

So what is a mugwump? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, there are two definitions: “A bolter from the Republican party in 1884” and “A person who is independent (as in politics) or who remains undecided or neutral”.

The dictionary website says: “Mugwump is an anglicised version of a word used by Massachusett Indians to mean ‘war leader’.” “The word was sometimes jestingly applied in early America to someone who was the ‘head guy’.”

It continues: “The first political mugwumps were Republicans in the presidential race of 1884 who chose to support Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland rather than their own party’s nominee. Their independence prompted one 1930s humorist to define mugwump as ‘a bird who sits with its mug on one side of the fence and its wump on the other’.”

Wikipedia has a similar definition, with the addendum: “Mugwumps were rightwing, similar in view to the British Tory party.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes a mugwump as “one who holds more or less aloof from party-politics, professing disinterested and superior views”.

In the world of Harry Potter, the supreme mugwump is the title of the head of the International Confederation of Wizards. The first appointed supreme mugwump was Pierre Bonaccord. However, his appointment was contested by warlocks in Liechtenstein because he wanted to ban troll-hunting and grant rights to trolls.

Albus Dumbledore was also appointed supreme mugwump, but was dismissed from his position after the Ministry of Magic refused to believe that Lord Voldemort had returned. Dumbledore was restored as a member of the Confederation when the ministry accepted Voldemort’s return, but not as supreme mugwump.

Supporters of Corbyn have long called him a “socialist version” of Dumbledore, the hero and headmaster of Hogwarts. But Last year, JK Rowling put these comparisons to end, tweeting to her millions of followers: “Corbyn. Is. Not. Dumbledore”.

In the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch, which follows the narration of a junkie, William Lee, mugwumps are a predatory, alien species. “On stools covered in white satin sit naked mugwumps sucking translucent, coloured syrup through alabaster straws,” Burroughs wrote. “Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients.”

In Roald Dahl’s the Twits, the Muggle-Wumps are a group of caged monkeys, but perhaps the closest comparison comes from Dahl’s the complete adventures of Charlie and Mr Willy Wonka, in which Wonka refers to Mrs Bucket as “my dear old muddleheaded mugwump”. “What does it matter that the old girl has become a trifle too old?” Wonka says. “We can put that right in a jiffy! Have you forgotten Wonka-Vite and how every tablet makes you twenty years younger? We shall bring her back! We shall transform her into a blossoming blushing maiden in the twink of an eye!”

Despite the fallout from the mugwump incident, Johnson has stuck by his choice of the word. Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, the former London mayor said: “I apologise to mugwumps everywhere.”

During an appearance on the Today programme to talk about Labour’s housebuilding pledge, John Healy, the shadow housing minister, said he, like many people, had to look up the meaning of the term “mugwump”, and that its use reflected more on the writer of the column than the target.

“I think this is Boris Johnson feeling left out of the election campaign,” Healy said, calling the incident “look-at-me name-calling that you’d see in the Eton playground”.

He said such an attack demeaned the office of the foreign secretary. “Don’t attack the person debate the policies … let the people see a leaders’ debate.”

In his column, Johnson also said the leader of the opposition was more than just “an essentially benign Islingtonian herbivore”, adding: “The biggest risk with Jeremy Corbyn is that people just don’t get what a threat he really is.”

Britons are abandoning the ebook at an alarming rate with sales of consumer titles down almost a fifth last year, as “screen fatigue” helped fuel a five-year high in printed book sales.

Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% to £204m last year, the lowest level since 2011 – the year the ebook craze took off as Jeff Bezos’ market-dominating Amazon Kindle took the UK by storm.

It is the second year running that sales of consumer ebooks – the biggest segment of the £538m ebook market, which fell 3% last year – have slumped as commuters, holidaymakers and leisure readers shelve digital editions in favour of good old fashioned print novels.

“I wouldn’t say that the ebook dream is over but people are clearly making decisions on when they want to spend time with their screens,” says Stephen Lotinga, chief exeutive of the Publishers Association, which published its annual yearbook on Thursday.

“There is generally a sense that people are now getting screen tiredness, or fatigue, from so many devices being used, watched or looked at in their week. [Printed] books provide an opportunity to step away from that.”

Sales of consumer ebooks hit a high water mark of £275m in 2014, when they accounted for half of the overall ebook market. The decline in consumer ebooks has been led by a slump in sales of the most popular segment, fiction, which plummeted 16% to £165m last year.

Lotinga says that while there has been an increase in sales of ebooks and subscriptions in non-consumer areas, such as education and academic titles, there are certain types of consumer books people prefer to read in paper format.

Among last year’s biggest sellers were children’s books by JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and David Walliams (The Midnight Gang, The World’s Worst Children), which helped sales of print and digital kids books to soar 16% to £365m. Diet book guru Joe Wicks (Lean in 15) was also a huge hit.

“The titles that sold really well last year did not lend themselves to digital,” says Lotinga. “People prefer to give, or read, children’s books like Harry Potter titles in print, and healthy cooking titles and biographies sell very well in print compared to ebook format.”

Print sales of consumer book titles – fiction, non-fiction and children’s titles – rose almost 9% last year to £1.55bn. The total UK print book market, including non-consumer areas such as journals, rose 8% to a five-year high of £3bn.

“We saw a very marginal increase in overall print sales in 2015, but last year people flocked back to print in droves,” says Lotinga.

Issues with a slowdown in ereaders being bought, linked to the rise of smartphones, has contributed to the decline in ebook popularity and renewed surge in book sales.

“The ubiquity of larger screen smartphones and tablets appears to have impacted the demand for ereaders,” says Richard Broughton, analyst at Ampere. “However, for many consumers the screens on smartphones and tablets are not as conducive to reading, not as comfortable”.

With most Britons now carrying hi-tech, expensive phones many just don’t want to have the extra cost, and potential headache, of carrying and looking after more devices.

“For consumers travelling or on holiday having an additional ereader device to look after is awkward,” says Broughton. “A physical copy of a book is a disposable low-cost entertainment tool. It doesn’t matter if you leave it in your hotel room, on a train or by the swimming pool.”

The issue with consumer ebooks aside the UK book industry is in fine fettle. Total sales of print and digital books and journals climbed 7% to £4.8bn last year, the largest growth since 2007 when digital sales were first included.

Looking purely at the book market total sales rose 6% to £3.5bn, as an 8% rise in print sales outweighed the 3% decline in ebook sales.

Overall digital sales grew 6% to £1.7bn, with academic, professional and educational journals outstripping the fall in ebooks, to account for 35% of total revenues.

Despite this success Lotinga warned that with Europe the largest market for UK books, accounting for 35% of international sales, it is imperative that Theresa May’s Brexit deal protects the publishing industry.

“Whatever the makeup of the new government, they must ensure that any post-Brexit trade settlement it reaches with the EU and other countries reinforces this success,” says Lotinga.

Overseas sales increased 6% last year to £2.6bn, 54% of total revenues.

Film director Jonathan Demme, best known for The Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild, has died at the age of 73. His publicist told Variety that the cause of death was “cancer complications”.

The Silence of the Lambs, the horror-thriller adapted from Thomas Harris’ novel, was the high point of his career as a mainstream film-maker: the film won five Oscars, including best director for Demme, and made its central character, Hannibal Lecter, into a household name.

However, it was untypical of Demme’s career, both before and after its 1991 release. Having spent much of the 1960s living in London and working as a music writer, Demme cut his teeth in the no-budget school of Roger Corman: initially as a writer, then gaining his first directorial credit on the prison flick Caged Heat in 1974. (Its tag line: “Women’s prison USA – Rape Riot and Revenge! White Hot Desires melting cold prison steel!)

After directing two other films for Corman, Demme found a niche in the burgeoning independent cinema scene with his 1980 film Melvin and Howard, a comedy about a former milkman who claims to be the heir of Howard Hughes. Later in the same decade, Demme completed the yuppie-in-peril comedy Something Wild, which gave Melanie Griffith one of her early successful roles.

The Silence of the Lambs, he said later, “was a great delirious shock to everybody concerned”, but he appeared to being disquieted by the controversies that accompanied it, and subsequently concentrated on films that reflected his own politically liberal credentials. Philadelphia, which starred Tom Hanks in an Oscar-winning performance and brought Aids and gay characters into the mainstream. Meanwhile, Beloved, released in 1998, was an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s seminal novel about slavery.

Alongside his feature film career, Demme indulged a for the odd, the eccentric and the underground. He made documentaries about Talking Heads (including Stop Making Sense, 1984), Neil Young (among them Heart of Gold, 2006) and his radical priest cousin (Cousin Bobby, 1992); he filmed Spalding Gray’s celebrated one-man show Swimming to Cambodia (1987), and shot a profile of US president Jimmy Carter (Man from Plains, 2007).

His mainstream film-making took a dip in the 2000s, after the poorly received remake of Charade, The Truth About Charlie and a new version of The Manchurian Candidate, but he restored his reputation with the wedding comedy-drama Rachel Getting Married and the likable girl-rocker film Ricki and the Flash.

Jodie Foster, who won an Oscar for her role in The Silence of the Lambs released a statement earlier today. “I am heart-broken to lose a friend, a mentor, a guy so singular and dynamic you’d have to design a hurricane to contain him,” it read. “Jonathan was as quirky as his comedies and as deep as his dramas. He was pure energy, the unstoppable cheerleader for anyone creative. Just as passionate about music as he was about art, he was and will always be a champion of the soul. JD, most beloved, something wild, brother of love, director of the lambs. Love that guy. Love him so much.”

Meryl Streep, who took the title role in Ricki and the Flash, also released a statement to pay tribute to “A big hearted, big tent, compassionate man” while Tom Hanks called him “the grandest of men.”

Film-makers such as Edgar Wright and James Wan have also paid tribute to Demme on Twitter, with Wright saying: “Admired his movies, his documentaries, his concert films. He could do anything.”

Science fiction writer William Gibson is to use the dream of a Hillary Clinton win in last year’s US presidential election as the launch point for his next novel. Gibson, who coined the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 debut Neuromancer, will reimagine the world under a Clinton presidency in his next novel Agency, as well as London in the distant future.

Due out in January 2018, the novel will travel between two periods: one in present-day San Francisco, where Clinton’s White House ambitions are realised; and the other in a post-apocalyptic London, 200 years into the future after 80% of the world population has been killed.

In the present-day strand of Gibson’s story, a shadowy military organisation develops and tests artificial intelligence on a young woman named Verity. The parts set in the distant future show that time travel has been discovered and used to create a “stub”, a way of interfering to create an alternative future, starting in 2017.

The author, whose books include The Difference Engine and All Tomorrow’s Parties, said the new book acts as an unplanned sequel to his 2014 novel The Peripheral, which also features London after climate change, famine and war have ravaged the Earth. However, he told the New York Times, his target was closer to the present day: “Every imaginary future ever written is about the time it was written in … People talk about science fiction’s predictive possibilities, but that’s a by-product. It’s all really about now.”

The manuscript was written before Clinton’s defeat in November rendered the original plot obsolete. Although he attempted to rewrite the original draft with the Trump win in mind, Gibson said: “It was immediately obvious to me that there had been some fundamental shift and I would have to rebuild the whole thing.”

The author has yet to confirm whether the alternative history he imagines under Clinton is more positive than he envisioned in July 2016 when he urged US voters: “To not vote for Clinton *is* to vote for the candidate Putin and David Duke so badly wants you to. It’s a raggedy-ass world, that way.”

Gibson-watchers will be looking closely at his latest vision of humanity’s future. Hailed as one of the most important novelists, whose influence is shown on everything from The Matrix to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the 69-year-old has gained a reputation for prescience. He has predicted, among other developments, the rise of reality television, virtual sex and technologies such as Google Glass. He credits his success in seeing into the future not on understanding technology but on his observations of the people who use it. In 2007, he told PC Magazine: “I’m anything but an early adopter, generally. In fact, I’ve never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don’t watch them; I watch how people behave around them.”

A historical novel about the life and adventures of an Andalusian adventurer and Sufi mystic has taken the most prestigious prize in Arabic fiction.

Saudi author Mohammed Hasan Alwan won the $50,000 (£39,000) International prize for Arabic fiction for A Small Death, his fictional account of the life of Sunni scholar Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. The novel follows him from his birth in Muslim Spain in 1165 to his death in Damascus in 1240, taking in journeys from Andalusia to Azerbaijan, and his reflections on the violence witnesses in Morocco, Egypt, the Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia), Syria, Iraq and Turkey. A contentious figure in history, Ibn ‘Arabi has been declared the foremost spiritual leader in Sufism by some, but condemned as an apostate by others.

Alwan, who was born in Riyadh but now lives in Toronto, received the award at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday night. The author of five novels, he was previously shortlisted for the prize in 2013 for The Beaver, the French translation of which won the Arab World Institute’s Prix de la Littérature Arabe in 2015.

Alwan said it may seem odd to readers that he wrote about Ibn ‘Arabi “whilst residing in this distant cold corner of the world in Canada”. He added: “I realised that being exposed to what is seemingly foreign or different is what drives me to reconnect with myself, as well as with my heritage and old culture.”

Chair of judges Sahar Khalifeh said of A Small Death: “With striking artistry and in captivating language, it sheds light on Ibn ‘Arabi’s view of spiritual and temporal love in their most refined forms.”

The International prize for Arabic fiction, which has been running for 10 years, provides a boost in sales and recognition for Arab authors by providing additional funding for an English translation of the winner each year. Thirty-three of the prize’s winning and shortlisted novels have been translated into 24 languages over the last decade. The 2016 winner Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba by Palestinian author Rabai al-Madhoun will be published in English for the first time this autumn.

A Small Death was picked from a six-book shortlist whittled down from 186 novels from 19 countries. The other shortlisted writers – Najwa Binshatwan (Libya), Ismail Fahd Ismail (Kuwait), Elias Khoury (Lebanon), Mohammed Abdel Nabi (Egypt) and Saad Mohammed Raheem (Iraq) – receive $10,000.

Robert Pirsig, author of the influential 1970s philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has died at the age of 88.

Peter Hubbard, executive editor of his publisher William Morrow & Co, said in a statement that Pirsig’s wife Wendy had confirmed his death at his home in Maine “after a period of failing health”.

Published in 1974 after being rejected by more than 100 other publishers, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was the father-son story of a motorcycle trip across the western United States. Loosely autobiographical, it also contained flashbacks to a period in which the author was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

The book quickly became a best-seller. Pirsig said its protagonist “set out to resolve the conflict between classic values that create machinery, such as a motorcycle, and romantic values, such as experiencing the beauty of a country road”.

Born in Minneapolis, Pirsig had a high IQ and graduated high school at the age of 15. He earned a degree in philosophy and also worked as a technical writer and instructor of English before being hospitalised for mental illness in the early 1960s.

His philosophical thinking and personal experiences during these years, including a 1968 motorcycle trip across the US West with his eldest son, Christopher, formed the core of the narrative of the novel.

Pirsig worked on the sequel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals for 17 years before its publication in 1991. The story traced a sailboat journey taken by two fictitious characters along America’s eastern coast.

Pirsig lived the last 30 years in South Berwick, Maine and is survived by his wife Wendy, two children and three grandchildren. His son Chris died in 1979.

A novel that “illustrates what it is to be human” has become the first translated book to win the Wellcome prize for science writing.

Maylis de Kerangal’s Mend the Living, which tracks the journey of a heart from donor to recipient over 24 hours, is only the second novel ever to scoop the £30,000 prize, which is awarded to a work of fiction or nonfiction that engages with health and medicine.

Announcing the winner, chair of judges Val McDermid said: “Sometimes you read a memoir and it is just one person’s tragedy, but this is about the tragedy and hope that comes from loss that could affect every single one of us.” She said the judges “felt very strongly” that the book had the potential to change the lives of readers and called it “compelling, original and ambitious”.

De Kerangal’s novel was translated from French by Jessica Moore, who was awarded £10,000. McDermid praised the translation, which she told the Guardian pulled off the difficult trick of shaping a book into a second language without undermining the intention or voice of the original.

Describing herself as a “long-time advocate” of translated fiction, McDermid, a bestselling crime writer, said: “Publishers have very slowly woken up to the importance to readers of translated fiction as a way of understanding a globalised world … The English language doesn’t have a monopoly on terrific writing and I am very happy to be one of the judges who chose this book.”

Mend the Living begins with vibrant young surfer Simon Limbeau suffering catastrophic injuries in a road traffic accident. Faced with a son who has been left brain dead, his parents are forced to decide whether to turn off his life support and donate his heart. The story then follows Limbeau’s heart on its way to a donor recipient and explores how people recover hope in tragic circumstances.

The novel, which was also longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker international prize, has also been adapted to film. Directed by Katell Quillévéré and renamed Heal the Living (Réparer les vivants), it stars Tahar Rahim, Emmanuelle Seigner and Anne Dorval and is set for a UK release at the end of April.

Mend the Living was chosen from a strong shortlist of six books that included two novels, the other being Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss, about a family navigating the NHS as they come to terms with a child’s unexpected illness.

Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, which examines how the 40tn microbes in the human body affect us, was the only debut on the shortlist. The other three books interweaved science with personal experience. Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi was the first author to be in contention for the prize posthumously, with his memoir When Breath Becomes Air recounting his final months of life with terminal lung cancer. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene blends a narrative about genetics with the story of reoccurring mental illness in his family, while David France, a gay man and an eyewitness to the Aids epidemic, wrote of the struggle faced by HIV/Aids activists during the 1980s in How to Survive a Plague.

McDermid chaired a panel of judges that mixed broadcasters and writers with scientists. Cambridge professors Simon Baron-Cohen and Tim Lewens joined the Wire in the Blood author on a panel completed by broadcaster Gemma Cairney and radio producer Di Speirs.

Author and conservationist Kuki Gallmann, whose memoir I Dreamed of Africa was turned into a Hollywood film starring Kim Basinger, has been shot by raiders at her ranch in Kenya.

The 73-year-old is reported to have suffered extensive internal injuries and is in “a stable, but critical” condition.

In recent weeks, Gallman had sent a string of increasingly distressed messages to a New York Times journalist after heavily armed militia invaded her ranch in Laikipia, a popular tourist destination.

On Saturday, a lodge on the estate was ransacked and Gallmann was attacked after investigating the damage. A bullet shot by raiders went through the door of her vehicle, hitting her in the hip and slicing up through her body.

Rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service fought off the attackers, and Gallmann was airlifted to a hospital in Nairobi, where she underwent surgery on Sunday. She remains in hospital. Close friends of Gallmann’s told the New York Times that the coming days could be critical.

In her 1991 memoir, Gallmann recounted her journey from wealthy Italian socialite to rancher in the Laikipia plain. A vociferous campaigner for the environment, she moved to the country with her husband and son in 1972. Both died in separate accidents years later. She has long campaigned for the coexistence of people and nature in Kenya.

The attack on Gallmann comes amid mounting violence in the country as a result of a devastating drought, with armed raiders driving more than 200,000 livestock through northern Kenya in search of pastureland. Chaos has also followed last week’s primary elections, with claims that politicians are encouraging the violence.

At least 14 people have been killed, including former British army officer Tristan Voorspuy, who was shot while inspecting a vandalised lodge on his ranch. Hundreds of people have also been displaced from their properties.

Last month, Gallman spoke of her fears after armed cattle rustlers and nomadic herders invaded farms and nature reserves in Laikipia. Gallman’s daughter, Sveva Makena, said she was hopeful things would settle down after local elections. “We remain positive that this wave of terror and mayhem will pass once elections and the rains have come, and that the government are doing what they can to restore law and order one step at a time,” she said.

The shooting of Kuki Gallmann is thought to be in reprisal for the killing of herdsmen and cattle after the Kenyan government deployed troops following the killing of Voorspuy. As well as taking land, the herders have been accused of killing wildlife, including elephants, in the conservation area.

In a statement issued on Sunday afternoon, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta condemned the shooting and warned: “Politicians encouraging invasions of privately owned property or attacks on individuals can expect strong deterrent action.”

US president Bill Clinton once dubbed it “the Woodstock of the mind”. Now marking its 30th year, Hay festival is set to tackle Brexit, climate change and Donald Trump with a varied and high-profile political lineup. Stars include US senator Bernie Sanders, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the former president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón.

Sanders, the outspoken critic of Donald Trump and longest serving independent in US congressional history, will speak at the festival – held in and around the small town of Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border – about what will happen next in the US.

Festival director Peter Florence said that he hoped Sanders would “galvanise young people like he did in America” in his campaign to be the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate. He added: “The way he’s working to interrogate every stupid bill in the Senate is heroic and essential. He’s a model opposition leader.”

Other political figures making an appearance at Hay include Varoufakis – appearing for the second year in a row – who will make the plea for reform in the European Union. Calderón, who positioned Mexico as a leader in the fight against climate change during his time as president, will take part in a debate about climate. Former home secretary Alan Johnson and Labour MP Jess Philips, whose memoir Everywoman was published in February, will also appear.

On the literary side of the festival, the 2016 Man Booker prize winner Paul Beatty is set to appear, alongside Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Colm Toíbín, Pulitzer-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ian Rankin, Paula Hawkins, David Mitchell, Helen Fielding and Jeanette Winterson. Baileys prize winners Lisa McInerney and Eimear McBride will also be there, as will Howard Jacobson, speaking about his novella Pussy, written in around six weeks following Trump’s election with the aim of offering readers the “consolation of savage satire”.

TV personality Graham Norton, whose debut novel Holding was published in 2016 to widely positive reviews, will be speaking, as will Charlotte Rampling, whose 2015 memoir Qui Je Suis was translated from French and released in English earlier this month.

Coinciding with the festival’s 30th anniversary, this year is the quincentenary of Martin Luther’s theses in 1517. The 95 challenges to church practices are believed to have kick-started the protestant reformation, after they were sent to the Archbishop of Mainz – and reputedly pinned to church doors in the town of Wittenberg – on 31 October 1517. Hay is set to mark the coincidence with a lineup of events that ask writers and thinkers to reimagine institutions and orthodoxies for the modern era. Speakers include Stephen Fry on the digital sphere; former deputy governor of the Bank of England, Nemat Shafik, on expertise; Winterson on marriage; and Suzanne O’Sullivan on the NHS.

Other notable public figures attending include artist Tracey Emin, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, philosopher Peter Singer, comedians Eddie Izzard and Sandy Toksvig, Pussy Riot co-founder Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Queen guitarist Brian May. Award-winning director Ken Loach will deliver the annual Raymond Williams lecture, while Welsh actor Michael Sheen will give the Aneurin Bevan lecture, always delivered by a prominent member of the Labour movement. Sheen recently revealed that he hoped to focus more on political activism.

The Hay festival will run 25 May to 4 June. Tickets go on general sale 6 April.

German illustrator Wolf Erlbruch has won the world’s largest cash prize for children’s literature, the Astrid Lindgren memorial award, honouring an entire body of work by an author or institution.

Erlbruch, who has been nominated for the award several times, is a much-venerated figure in children’s literature in Germany; his books often tackle difficult and dark themes in childhood. He was one of 226 candidates from 60 countries for the 5m Swedish kronor (£445,000) honour, which goes to work “of the highest artistic quality” featuring the “humanistic values” of the late Pippi Longstocking author. The jury called him “a careful and caring visionary” who “makes existential questions accessible and manageable for readers of all ages”.

Boel Westin, who chairs the prize, said: “He is expanding the limits of what the children’s book can be … He gives new perspective on both the art of picture books and the subjects that you can talk about in a book for children. He is a very honest illustrator.

“Just like Astrid Lindgren, Wolf has the capacity to talk about the difficult things in life, like death and so on, with warmth and without sentimentality. He doesn’t really care what you can do, he just does it. I think that is something he has in common with Lindgren.”

Born in 1948, Erlbruch began working in children’s books when a publisher saw some lions he had drawn for an advertisement. In 1985, his first book – illustrations for James Aggrey’s The Eagle That Would Not Fly – was published; he has since written 10 books and illustrated nearly 50 more by other authors.

Erlbruch, who combines different techniques – collage, pencil, chalk drawings and watercolour – is most famous for his illustrations in Werner Holzwarth’s 1994 picture book The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business, following a mole who discovers an animal has defecated on his head. The mole wears circular glasses strikingly similar to Erlbruch’s own. Some of his books contain autobiographical references, such as Leonard, the story of a boy who becomes a dog that was inspired by his son’s childhood fear of dogs. His son Leonard is now an illustrator himself.

Death is a reoccurring theme in Erlbruch’s books. His 2008 picture book Duck, Death and the Tulip is about a duck who is followed by Death, with the pair striking up an uneasy friendship as the duck asks questions of her pursuer. In her review for the Guardian, Meg Rosoff – last year’s winner of the Astrid Lindgren award – called it “extraordinary”, adding: “Erlbruch gives the impression that he is an artist incapable of sentimentality, but his drawings have a delicacy and a sweet humour that helps us cope with the immensity of the subject.”

At the ceremony in Stockholm’s National Library, the jury played the phone call in which Erlbruch was informed of his win. “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Erlbuch, when told who was calling, and chuckled when informed he had won the prize. “I am speechless, sorry.”

He said he felt he had witnessed a good omen earlier that day: “I went for a walk before and a young man on a bicycle came by and looked back to me, going up the hill. He said: ‘Thank you for your children’s books.’ It is strange, it is a good omen.”

Westin said she hoped the win would encourage English-language publishers to translate his books. “I would really hope so. He’s worth it,” she said. “More children should have more access to his books.”

The Astrid Lindgren memorial award was founded in 2002 by the Swedish government, and has been won in the past by Shaun Tan, Maurice Sendak and Philip Pullman. Erlbruch will be presented with the award on 29 May in Stockholm.

Hopes that science and its unending quest for the truth can mend the cracks in a divided society have taken a hit as new research has found liberals and conservatives share little common ground on the subject – apart from a fascination with dinosaurs.

Because science intends – in theory at least – to accrue facts from solid evidence, it stands a chance of bringing people together on issues they all agree with, such as the Earth circling the sun, and the first five digits of pi. That, the hope goes, might help reverse the social fragmentation that increasingly pits different groups against one another.

But the research published on Monday suggests that the potential for science to unite across the political divide might be rather limited. “It turns out that liberals and conservatives can agree about dinosaurs, but not much else,” said Michael Macy, director of the social dynamics lab and author on the study at Cornell University in New York.

With researchers at Yale and the University of Chicago, Macy pored over more than a million book purchases by people on the right and left of the political spectrum. He found that while both sides shared a broad interest in science, there was little overlap in the subjects they read, or the books they picked within scientific fields.

“We wanted to see to what extent science is something that liberals and conservatives might agree on, and if that could serve as a bridge across the political divide,” Macy said.

The researchers marked people as liberals or conservatives based on the political books they bought from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, two of the largest online booksellers in the US. Multiple books were used to define people’s political leanings, including Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father and Mitt Romney’s No Apology. The researchers then looked at what science books the people bought too, and sorted them into fields such as medicine, psychology, climatology and oceanography.

The results showed that liberals generally preferred basic science, including physics, astronomy and zoology, while conservatives favoured the more applied and commercial sciences, with topics ranging from criminology and medicine to geophysics. Books on dinosaurs, and palaeontology in general, were popular in both groups, as was veterinary medicine. “The more the science gets away from anything remotely politically relevant, the more likely it is to serve as a bridge,” said Macy.

Even within subjects, liberals and conservatives read very different books. Among the biology books read by liberals was The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution by Richard Dawkins, with conservatives opting more for The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Jonathan Wells. In the field of astronomy, conservatives might go for God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow, with liberals favouring Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.

“You could say that liberals were a bit more interested in science for its own sake. Conservatives seem somewhat more interested in science where there is a conservative political alignment,” said Macy, whose study appears in Nature Human Behaviour.

The authors call on teachers, lecturers and scientists themselves to up their game on a number of counts. “First and foremost we need to get people excited about science for science’s sake. The second thing is for the sciences to encourage the appreciation of the critical perspective that scientists use,” Macy said.

Meanwhile, those in the social sciences in particular should do more to help people to break out of their “echo chambers” and discuss their views with people who disagree with them. That would help people to better understand not only others’ arguments, but their own too, Macy said.

In work published last year, Dan Kahan, a professor of law at Yale University, found that fostering scientific curiosity helped people to engage openly with information that went against their political stances. “I still think there is room to think science curiosity can help promote public agreement on disputed science issues,” he said.

Miles Hewstone, director of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup Conflict said there was “an increasing and worrying trend of such social fragmentation” based on ideology, religion and views of science. “We have to find ways to keep the two sides talking to each other, or at least aware of, and preferably respectful of, each other’s positions,” he said.

“Suggested ways to do this include provision of an on-screen button where we can choose to overcome the selective exposure identified in this research. That may seem like a long shot, when opinions are so entrenched, but as Jane Austen warned, ‘It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first’.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richmal Crompton has long been overshadowed by her creation Just William, but the darker side of her imagination is set to be rediscovered, with several of her lesser-known adult novels coming back into print.

Although best known for her 38 books about the errant schoolboy William Brown and his gang of Outlaws, Lancashire-born Compton was a prolific writer for both children and adults, often publishing two books a year, as well as writing short stories magazines. “She wrote 41 adult novels as well as the Just William books,” her new publisher Harriet Sanders said. “They did very well at the time and display something that you see in other writers of children’s books … the clarity with which they are written.”

The eight books are part of a forgotten backlist written by Crompton before the second world war. Her comic creation went on to eclipse these works aimed at older readers, but they were bestsellers when they first appeared. Featuring sharp-eyed spinsters, young women frustrated by the bounds of convention and hapless but well-meaning sleuths, the titles provide the flipside to English village life so evocatively captured in Crompton’s children’s books.

“These are much darker than her children’s books and reveal a rather gloomy outlook on life,” said Sanders, publisher of Bello, a digital imprint of Macmillan, which published the titles this week. “They are almost like soap operas, featuring divorce, infidelity and, in every one, a narcissistic character totally lacking in empathy.”

Although not rumbustious like the Just William books, Sanders said Crompton revealed a wry sense of humour in the novels, which she likened to Jane Austen’s social observation. Austen’s Emma Woodhouse would find a companion in arms in Norma Felicity Montague Harborough, the heroine of Felicity Stands By, Sanders said, thanks to Norma’s misguided matchmaking attempts.

The darkest of Crompton’s books to be republished is Leadon Hill. Set in a quiet English village that is ruled by Miss Mitcham, who brutally tears apart the lives of those who cross her. At the time of publication in 1927, the novel was likened to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.

Born in 1890, clergyman’s daughter Crompton started her adult life as a schoolteacher after becoming involved in the suffragettes at university. Though regarded as an excellent teacher, she was forced to give up aged 33 after contracting polio and losing the use of her right leg.

In 1919, she published her first Just William story in Home magazine, and turned to writing professionally. Within three years of leaving teaching her earnings from books and short stores had enabled her to have a house built for herself and her mother. While she never married, she was an aunt and great aunt to an extended family, which undoubtedly provided a rich source of material for her work.

She died in 1969, aged 78, but her children’s books have continued to grow in popularity, selling more than 12m books in the UK alone.

Despite this success, she regarded her real work as her adult fiction. Sanders said that she hoped the reissues would go some way to reviving her reputation as a writer for adults.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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