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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abramović reportedly was very pleased with the final novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaders’ faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven British spies have been outed in a new biography of Maxwell Knight, the naturalist and spymaster who is believed to have been the model for M in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. The seven worked for MI5 in the interwar years and included prominent members of the Communist party and fringe members of the Bloomsbury circle.

The identities of the spies are revealed in M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster, a new biography by historian Henry Hemming. “It was a totally unexpected find,” Hemming said. “I had no intention of finding this out, but as I started going through the files and building up a picture of who the spies run by Knight were, I realised that with a bit of detective work I could find out their names.” Although he admitted absolute proof of the spies’ true identities would only be found in closed MI5 files, he was “99.9% certain” that he had identified the ring.

The most prominent of the names uncovered was Graham Pollard, codenamed M/1 by Knight. The son of a well-respected Tudor historian, Pollard infiltrated the centre of the British Communist party in the 20s and 30s and married a prominent member of the party as part of his cover.

The historian identified Pollard from references to an “HG” in MI5 records. HG had provided information on four comrades with whom he shared a house in Camden Town in London. From this information and references to his daily work, Hemming was able to identify him as Pollard, who at his death was lauded in the Times as one of the most distinguished bibliographers of his generation.

Though Pollard was close to the heart of the British Communist party, he made an unlikely spy, let alone communist luminary. At Oxford, he distinguished himself with his book collection and by beating Evelyn Waugh to a “half blue” in spitting (at a distance of 10 feet). Once in London, his life was far from that of the industrial proletariat. Rising late, he would lunch at the exclusive Chez Victor, before heading to the famous Birrell and Garnett bookshop, of which he owned a part-share acquired from Bloomsbury luminary David “Bunny” Garnett.

After an afternoon in the shop, he would head to a party meeting, before filing a report to his spymaster. By the early 30s, he had almost reached the very centre of the party and was filing reports from the Daily Worker, where he held a staff job. Much of the information he filed overlapped with that of Vivian Hancock-Nunn, a barrister who was codenamed M/7. Hancock-Nunn provided free legal advice to party publications and may have leaked information to prosecutors about party members’ defences in forthcoming trials.

Pollard and Hancock-Nunn were the most prominent of the seven, who Hemming said risked their lives in the fight, first against Soviet Russia and then Nazi Germany. Their less visible colleagues included three women – Kathleen Tesch (M/T), Mona Maund (M/2) and Olga Grey (M/12) – recruited by Knight despite disapproval from his superiors, who regarded espionage by women as on a par with sex work.

“One of the biggest contributions that Maxwell Knight made to MI5 was to let women in,” Hemming said. “Most of his greatest spies were women, like Gray who broke up a Soviet ring at Woolwich Arsenal, and Hélène de Munk and Marjorie Mackie who together broke up the Wolkoff-Kent ring of fascists in 1940.”

Although M was made famous by Ian Fleming, Hemming said that the way he and his spies operated more closely resembled George Smiley and his people in the novels of John le Carré – who also worked for Knight at one point.

But the links with literature went deeper than the inventions of former spies, Hemming added: “The really important thing to remember with these agents is that none of them had any training in spycraft or surveillance. Their only reference points were what they read in spy novels like John Buchan’s,” he said. “There was a fantastic interweaving between real and fictional espionage.”

Despite the professionalisation of tradecraft and the introduction of technology, the historian said the relationship between fiction and reality remains strong in espionage circles. “When it comes to the present day, I don’t think that people working for MI5 or MI6 are immune to watching Homeland, and things like that do have an influence,” he added.

The agents

Kathleen Tesch, codenamed M/T was an animal-loving housewife with no previous experience of espionage. When Tesch had a one-on-one with Hitler in Germany, shortly before the start of the second world war, she broke the silence with “idiotic remarks, such as ‘What a very beautiful view’”. Hitler gave her an autographed copy of Mein Kampf.

Mona Maund, codenamed M/2 provided vital intelligence about Melita Norwood, who was the Soviet Union’s most productive British agent and spent 40 years undetected inside the British nuclear programme. Maund’s intelligence might have changed the direction of the cold war if Jasper Harker, who later became acting director of MI5, had not ignored it.

Eric Roberts, codenamed M/F became “Jack King”, the bank-clerk-turned-spy who infiltrated British right-wing groups during the war by posing as a Gestapo officer. Roberts was recruited by Knight, who used him to infiltrate the Communist party and then Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

Graham Pollard, codenamed M/1 infiltrated the Communist party, first for MI6 and then for MI5. He even married a communist – almost certainly to improve his cover. Pollard was the son of the great Tudor historian AF Pollard and, at one point, ran a fashionable bookshop in Bloomsbury.

Jimmy Dickson, codenamed M/3 was a civil servant who moonlighted in his spare time as an MI5 agent. Dickson wrote comedies for the BBC as well as bestselling thrillers. Under Knight’s guidance, he passed himself off first as a communist, then a fascist, providing the government with valuable intelligence on both.

Vivian Hancock-Nunn, codenamed M/7 was a barrister who worked as an MI5 agent deep inside the communist movement, providing free legal advice to Communist party publications.

Olga Gray, codenamed M/12 was a typist from Birmingham. Recruited over a game of golf to the secret service, Gray was given the task of infiltrating the Communist party and was able to uncover a communist cell operating at the Woolwich Arsenal.

Pulitzer prize winner Colson Whitehead has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, with his novel The Underground Railroad appearing on a six-book list that may be the prize’s most diverse yet.

Brought to fame by his Pulitzer win – and his selection for both former US president Barack Obama’s summer reading list and Oprah’s book club – Whitehead’s sixth novel follows two slaves who try to find freedom from their Georgia plantations by following the underground railroad: a network of safe houses in reality, Whitehead transforms the route into a literal, steampunk railway.

Alongside Whitehead is Becky Chambers, who made the 2016 shortlist with her debut The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and is nominated again for its sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit. Transgender Korean-American writer Yoon Ha Lee is listed for his debut Ninefox Gambit, as is Emma Newman for sci-fi mystery After Atlas and Israeli-born Lavie Tidhar for Central Station, set in the titular spaceport in a futuristic Tel Aviv. Eighteen years after winning for her novel Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan rounds out the list with Occupy Me, which the Guardian called “a work of startling originality”.

While Clarke himself – author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, among a multitude of novels – might seem like the archetype of the classic science fiction author, his award has long banged the drum for other voices. Thirty years since the first Clarke award was handed out in 1987 – when the inaugural winner, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was selected from a field including black author Samuel R Delany, Gwyneth Jones and Josephine Saxton – the award’s administrator Tom Hunter said the prize has always sought to find shortlists that were a true reflection of the genre. “For the judges, the big question is all about finding what they consider the best science fiction books of the year,” he said, adding: “I hope people will think of this as a diverse list in the best sense of the word … There is also a strong sense of cohesion and a powerful sense of just how exciting, challenging and insightful science fiction writing can be.”

Voted for by a jury, rather than a popular vote like the Hugos, this year’s judging panel is Shana Worthen, Paul March-Russell, Una McCormack, Charles Christian, Andrew McKie and chair Andrew M Butler, who said of the six books: “Any of these could win – at this point I cannot begin to guess.”

The shortlist was selected from 86 submissions – fewer than in recent years, when it has topped 100, but still almost double what was submitted when Hunter first took over as administrator a decade ago.

“The award was originally launched with the intention of positively promoting science fiction in the UK, and providing a prize that stood shoulder to shoulder with the big American awards like the Hugo or the Nebula. This was greatly helped by the fact we had a cash prize, originally supported directly by Sir Arthur, alongside the trophies and all the glory, and I think today the Clarke award stands right alongside those prizes,” he said.

The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London on 27 July, taking home the traditional cash prize equal to the year – £2,017 this time.

Arthur C Clarke 2017 shortlist

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton)
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
After Atlas by Emma Newman (Roc)
Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan (Gollancz)
Central Station by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Fleet)

The winners: family films

While glorious sunshine at the weekend created very tough conditions for cinema operators across the UK, the Easter school holiday delivered up an audience for titles with a clear family positioning. DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby posted £2.8m for the weekend period, just ahead of Beauty and the Beast’s £2.76m. However, a very aggressive previews strategy meant that The Boss Baby added takings from the preceding six days (1-6 April), essentially creating a nine-day opening “weekend” figure of £8.03m. In the same nine-day period, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast earned £12.21m.

Beauty and the Beast’s total now stands at a towering £58.5m, making it the 14th biggest hit of all time at the UK box office, ahead of titles including Casino Royale and The Dark Knight Rises, as well as six of the eight Harry Potter films.

Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience rounds out the top three, with a UK opening of £1.05m. The film’s title suggests that this is the first big-screen outing for the reliably profitable piglet; however, Peppa Pig: The Golden Boots debuted at UK cinemas in February 2015 with £687,000, on its way to a total of £2.33m. Both films are episode compilations – all exclusive and new in the case of the latest toddler-targeted assemblage.

The losers: adult comedies

While families seem by and large to have stuck with planned cinema outings at the weekend, adults stayed away in droves, with big drops for titles such as Ghost in the Shell, Jake Gyllenhaal sci-fi Life and Ben Wheatley’s trigger-happy Free Fire. Among new releases, audiences were thin for old-geezer comedy Going in Style, starring Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin – opening tally was a not-so-stylish £569,000 from 454 cinemas. The Anna Kendrick wedding comedy Table 19 opened ignominiously in 12th place, with £131,000 from 221 cinemas, and a puny site average of £591.

The indie battle: A Quiet Passion v Raw v I Am Not Your Negro

Three very different films battled to be crowned king of the arthouses at the weekend, with honours pretty even. Ignoring previews from consideration, only a few thousand pounds separated the weekend totals of Raul Peck’s historical documentary I Am Not Your Negro (£54,600), Terence Davies’ Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion (£52,100) and Julia Ducournau’s sexy French horror Raw (£48,800). I Am Not Your Negro, on the fewest screens among the trio, achieved the highest site average for the weekend.

Also fighting for a piece of the action was the Chilean biopic Neruda, from Jackie director Pablo Larraín – the film debuted with £28,400 from 26 cinemas. Contemporary London crime drama City of Tiny Lights was the emphatic loser of this week’s crop of indie flicks, with £15,700 from 57 cinemas for the weekend period. A big problem it faced: indie cinemas, its natural home, had plenty of other titles to choose from, and audiences were always unlikely to find it in multiplexes. The sunshine then sealed the fate for the picture, which stars Riz Ahmed and Billie Piper.

The steady player: Secret Cinema

One film that wasn’t at all affected by the sun was Secret Cinema’s presentation of Moulin Rouge! The event is essentially sold out every day, so takings barely fluctuate week to week – the latest session was up 2% at £202,000, for an eight-week total of £2.53m. The run for this event was initially scheduled to end after 11 weeks on 30 April, but it has now been extended by another six weeks to 11 June. This edition of Secret Cinema looks headed for a final gross north of £5m, which compares with £18.5m for the original nationwide cinema release in 2001.

The market

Despite the strong sunshine, takings matched the previous frame (a modest 4% rise, in fact), although that’s really all down to those whopping Boss Baby previews inflating the numbers – strip them out, and you’d see a significant drop. Takings are also 33% up on the equivalent session from 2016, when The Huntsman: Winter’s War debuted at the top spot. Expect another big cash win for cinemas with the arrival on Wednesday 12 April of The Fate of the Furious.

Top 10 films, 7-9 April

1. The Boss Baby, £8,025,886 from 598 sites (new)

2. Beauty and the Beast, £2,759,448 from 677 sites. Total: £58,485,266 (four weeks)

3. Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience, £1,050,962 from 531 sites

4. Ghost in the Shell, £725,720 from 551 sites. Total: £4,161,002 (two weeks)

5. Get Out, £596,746 from 399 sites. Total: £8,046,042 (four weeks)

6. Going in Style, £569,392 from 454 sites (new)

7. Smurfs: The Lost Village, £376,547 from 542 sites. Total: £2,430,688 (two weeks)

8. Power Rangers, £345,796 from 486 sites. Total: £3,931,439 (three weeks)

9. Kong: Skull Island, £328,692 from 365 sites. Total: £15,178,158 (five weeks)

10. Logan, £234,304 from 280 sites. Total: £23,329,028 (seven weeks)

Other openers

Table 19, £130,602 from 221 sites

I Am Not Your Negro, £86,908 (including £32,280 previews) from 46 sites

A Quiet Passion, £79,334 (including £27,261 previews) from 49 sites

Raw, £67,042 (including £17,053 previews) from 77 sites

Kaatru Veliyiadi, £47,956 from 27 sites

A Hero of Our Time – Bolshoi Ballet, £43,130 from 175 sites

Neruda, £40,490 (including £12,103 previews) from 26 sites

City of Tiny Lights, £28,038 (including £12,351 previews) from 57 sites

Mad to Be Normal, £23,008 (including £14,625 previews) from nine sites

Take Off, £17,175 from 16 sites

Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?, £11,495 (including £10,449 previews) from five sites

A Dark Song, £3,911 from nine sites

The Spacewalker, £2,640 from 10 sites

Sonsuz Ask, £1,638 from three sites

Urvi, £34 from one site (Ireland only)

• Thanks to comScore. All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland cinemas.

Bestselling author Jean Stein, known for her pioneering oral histories, is believed to have killed herself. She was 83.

Stein began her career as an assistant to theatre director Elia Kazan on the original production of Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. An editor on the Paris Review, she rose to prominence for her pioneering use of oral narratives to write three histories of the US in the 20th century. One of them, 1982’s Edie: An American Girl, became an international bestseller. Melding together the voices of family and friends including Andy Warhol, for whom Edie Sedgwick acted as muse, the book used the socialite’s troubled story to shed light on the decade. Norman Mailer praised it as “the book of the 60s that we have been waiting for”.

A New York City police department official said that Stein had jumped to her death on Sunday morning from the 15th floor of a Manhattan tower. A spokesperson at Random House, which published her most recent book, 2016’s West of Eden: An American Place, issued the short statement: “Random House is deeply saddened by the death of Jean Stein.”

Educated in Los Angeles, Switzerland, New York and the Sorbonne, where she had an affair with William Faulkner, Stein eventually took the editor’s seat on the literary and visual arts magazine Grand Street, a role she kept until 2004. Stein’s first husband was the lawyer William vanden Heuval, who served in the US justice department under Robert F Kennedy. Her second marriage, in 1995, was to Swiss Nobel prize-winner Torsten Wiesel, a neurophysiologist. They divorced in 2007.

In West of Eden, Stein trained her eye on her childhood home of Los Angeles and the dynasties of five larger-than-life families, including those of movie mogul Jack Warner, the Garlands, and her own. Her father Jules C Stein founded the media company MCA.

Her friend, journalist Robert Scheer, who had known Stein since the 60s, told the LA Times: “She was pretty depressed. We were all worried.” But he remembered her as a person who “had the respect of the heavy hitters, people who weren’t interested in the small talk – people like Joan Didion, Jules Feiffer. It was a circle of people who were very tough and demanding.”

The author is survived by two daughters: Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation; and Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actor and producer in New York.

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

From the faded brown ink on the yellowed paper of a document going on display this week in Cambridge, a startling picture emerges of a young man who lived and loved in 11th-century Cairo.

Toviyya wanted to marry Faiza, but he evidently had quite a reputation. The document, translated into English and on show for the first time in an exhibition at Cambridge University Library, records at great length that Toviyya swore in front of witnesses that his life would henceforth be blamelessly dull.

He promised to avoid mixing with bad company for the purpose of “eating, drinking or anything else”, to not spend one night away from Faiza unless she wanted him to, and not to buy a slave girl unless Faiza gave her permission.

The document is one of 200,000 drawn from the Genizah, the store room at the 11th-century Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. The Cambridge collection is the largest in the world of the medieval Jewish manuscripts.

For 800 years, the community stored texts and religious volumes at the Genizah, as well as wills, contracts, letters, a magical charm against scorpions and the doodles of a small child struggling to learn Hebrew script.

“The first scholars to study the papers were only interested in the biblical material, but what is extraordinary about the collection, and was almost ignored for many decades, is that it covers the whole range of human life,” said co-curator Benjamin Outhwaite, part of a team that has translated many of the papers into English for the exhibition. “We’ve gone for the documents that draw out these human stories.”

The characters featured within the tattered pages include an errant son-in-law, a wife threatening a hunger strike (but only by day) in protest against her husband’s behaviour, a Jewish woman in love with a Christian doctor, and a rich woman excommunicated for adultery.

One of the most poignant exhibits is a beautifully written letter on a piece of expensive vellum, useless for any grander purpose because it had a large hole. The letter was brought home by a brother and sister from their new school, which reported that despite a severe beating their bad behaviour had continued, so further beating at home was recommended.

The first of the Genizah papers to arrive in England was a page in Hebrew from a book by the revered scholar Ben Sira, which travelled in 1897 with the scholars Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson. Photographs show the twin sisters in veils and dark, heavy garments, protected by parasols as they travelled through the Middle East on ponies and donkeys.

Lewis and Gibson were primarily interested in biblical history, but the page they bought from a dealer in Cairo unlocked a lost world of medieval Jewish social history.

They showed it to a friend at Cambridge, Solomon Schechter, who swore them to secrecy in order to keep news of the discovery from the university’s great rival, Oxford, which eventually acquired a mere 25,000 of the Genizah documents.

Schechter hastened to Cairo to see if there were more papers. He uncovered many thousands, but later wrote: “A battlefield of books … Some have perished outright and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space.”

Only a fraction of the collection has been translated and thousands of documents are still to be studied. Outhwaite believes that further chapters in the story of Toviyya and Faiza may yet be found: the curators suspect their marriage may not have ended well.

• Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo is at Cambridge University Library from 27 April to 28 October 2017. Free admission
  

A few years ago, while working at a regional newspaper, I had to interview a local author about his self-published novel. It was a 500-page brick of a thriller with tiny, close type, a good third of which a professional editor would cheerfully have hacked out.

“What did you think?” the writer demanded. “Oh, I loved it,” I blithely lied, having managed about two pages before it brought on a migraine. He then quizzed me on the finer points of the sprawling, outlandish plot, and the individual characteristics and motivations of the cast of thousands. By the end, I was so exhausted I might as well have read the damn thing. But I think I got away with it.

Fibbing about our reading habits is, apparently, more common than we realise. According to the Reading Agency, which carried out a survey for the recent World Book Day, 41% of the 2,000 people polled admitted they had, in relation to the books they had claimed to have read, “told a lie, an odious damned lie; Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie”.

That’s from Shakespeare’s Othello – not that these mendacious millennial malefactors would know, for according to the survey, it’s members of the younger generation (64% of 18-24-year-olds) who are most inclined to claim to have read books when they haven’t done so.

Not that old Will gets a look in on the list of the most-fibbed about books this year. The 13 books we are most likely to claim to have read have one thing in common: they have all been adapted into blockbuster movies.

Ay, there’s the rub (kids, that one’s from … oh, never mind). Speaking honestly, we’ve all done this at some point in our lives – the VHS release of Kes in the 1980s was a godsend to everyone doing their English literature O levels.

Top of the current list are Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, followed by JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis’s Narnia series. Perhaps more curious is the fact that people claim to have read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, when there are more copies of both novels languishing in charity shops than could be sold before Armageddon, so supply issues are not putting people off trying to read them.

So, why do we fib? Not for shame at not having read these books, but to impress people by pretending we have done. Men do this more than women; the Reading Agency says one in five men even lies about his reading during job interviews. It’s probably de rigueur to have read Fleming’s oeuvre if you’re applying for a post at MI5, but it’s less clear what career benefit there would be in claiming to have read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (chief Scottish toilet cleaner, perhaps) …

Other situations when we lie about reading include when we first meet the prospective in-laws (“Sir, while I might appear to be a grubby, long-haired youth with designs on your daughter’s body, allow me to appraise you of the salient themes in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner”), social media (where no one can see your book shelves) and, of course, on dates (“I love Frank L Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, especially how it starts off in black and white and then – oh, heck”).

It’s interesting to compare this year’s list of most fibbed-about books with 2009’s, when people had loftier ambitions in their reading. That year’s top four were Orwell’s 1984, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Joyce’s Ulysses and the Bible.

Perhaps more of us have actually read those books now: last year’s BBC adaptation of War and Peace put Tolstoy in the bestseller list for the first time, and 1984 had a surge in sales this year after Donald Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway introduced us to the newspeak-ish phrase “alternative facts”, as people thought they had better read up on the dystopia we appeared to be living in. Still, I find it strangely heartening that people are still lying about reading in order to impress others – it means reading is at least still impressive.

A report on the future of public libraries from the prestigious Carnegie Trust has been slammed as “over-optimistic”, amid calls for it to be withdrawn. Leading library campaigner Tim Coates has filed a formal complaint with the charity’s trustees, claiming that the report, published last month, “seriously avoids the truth” about the long-term decline of the sector and misrepresents data on library use.

In an open letter, Coates says that the report, called Shining a Light, omits key evidence about the impact of cuts and underfunding and “seriously avoids the truth of what is happening”. He adds that the report “fails to draw the right conclusions from data in the research it has carried out”.

The report recommended a five-point plan to save a sector that has been in the frontline of savage cuts imposed on local government over the past 10 years. Among the recommendations were that libraries make better use of data to improve their offer and provide better online services; focus more on demonstrating how they help deliver government policies; and provide innovation and leadership training for staff.

Coates writes that the report avoids key evidence about “the essential, continuous and destructive decline of use in public libraries in the UK”. The report draws conclusions without evidence and fails to highlight key findings from the research done on behalf of the trust by Ipsos Mori, claims the former managing director of Waterstones, adding that it failed to research the views of lapsed library users or to highlight the role of leadership in the sector’s rapid decline.

Data overlooked by the report, according to Coates, include figures collated annually by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) on library usage and expenditure. In December, the latest Cipfa survey revealed UK public libraries had taken a £25m hit to budgets and 15m drop in visitors as a result of swingeing cuts by local authorities faced with reduced grant from central government and the rising cost of social care.

“I wrote the complaint because we have had so many reports from the Libraries Task Force and other bodies and they all ignore the really serious reality of what is happening to our libraries,” Coates said. “The whole public library service is effectively closing down.” He added that although the Carnegie report highlighted a general appreciation of libraries among the public, it failed to tackle why visitor numbers were in rapid decline.

“What the report says is that everybody understands what a wonderful thing a library ought to be,” he said. “But the reality is that when they visit their local library they don’t find anything in there that is any use to them. That is the problem.”

In his letter, Coates pointed to research that he claimed was “wrongly described” in Shining a Light. This included a lack of emphasis on the fact that only 6% of library use is of computers, down from 15 to 20%, 10 years ago. He also claimed that a finding that the single biggest improvement library users want is improved book stock was not given sufficient weight in the report.

Nick Poole, chief executive of the library and information association Cilip, said the reasons for the decline of libraries ranged from the impact of technology and funding pressures to reduced spending on books, and agreed that “swift and decisive action” was needed to improve the situation.

However, he gave only partial backing to Coates’s complaint. “We need to reconnect with what people want and expect from their libraries; to deliver the best value for taxpayers locally, regionally and nationally; to set out a clear investment programme; to excite people about what their local library has to offer; and convince national and local politicians that libraries are a good investment,” he said.

Coates was pessimistic that this would be possible without a fundamental restructure of library leadership, which, he said, lacked accountability. “The librarians blame cuts by local government, local government says it’s because of money taken by central government and central government says it is the fault of local government,” he said. “No one is responsible and they all blame everyone else.”

The Carnegie UK Trust expressed surprise at any suggestion the report was over-optimistic. “There is clear evidence from many sources of the pressures libraries are experiencing,” said a spokeswoman. “Our report quotes the number of library closures and job losses reported since 2010 and the headline of the media release displayed on our website was ‘Call for action as new study reveals drop in frequency of library use’.”

She added that Coates’s complaint would be given “proper scrutiny” and the trust would be writing to him in the next few days.