Transworld has acquired a childhood memoir by Labour MP and former home secretary Alan Johnson.
Publisher Doug Young bought UK and Commonwealth rights including serial from Andrew Kidd at Aitken Alexander Associates to This Boy, with publication date to be confirmed.
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Bloomsbury leads the way with three nominations across its imprints on the 14-strong longlist for the £27,500 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2011.
Behind the Boundary: Cricket at a Crossroads by Graeme Wright (A & C Black), Babysitting George by Celia Walden (Bloomsbury) and Among the Fans: From Ashes to the Arrows, a Year of Watching the Watchers by Patrick Collins (Wisden Sports Writing) get the nod for Bloomsbury.
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Transworld and Random House Australia have acquired debut novel The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman, winning a nine-way auction for the title.
Doubleday editorial director Jane Lawson bought UK and Commonwealth rights jointly with Beverley Cousins at RHA through Susan Armstrong at Conville and Walsh, with auctions ongoing in the US and Europe. Transworld plans to publish as a Doubleday hardback in 2012.
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Transworld has appointed Michelle Signore, currently editor-in-chief at John Blake, to the role of editorial director.
Signore will join Transworld on 17th October, and will report to publishing director Doug Young.
Signore said: "Working at John Blake for the last 12 years has been a wonderful experience and enormous fun. To be able to help build on the outstanding non-fiction list at Transworld, however, is the most amazing opportunity—I can't wait to join the team there and get started."
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Cornerstone has appointed Selina Walker, currently publishing director of Transworld's crime and thriller list, to the role of publisher for Century and Arrow.
Walker will begin her role in mid-July, following 11 years at Transworld where she worked with authors including Tess Gerritsen and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
At Century and Arrow, she steps into Kate Elton's shoes, who is moving to HarperCollins.
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Authors Kate Atkinson and Julia Donaldson have been awarded MBEs in this year's Birthday Honours List.
Transworld author Atkinson and newly-appointed children's laureate Donaldson were both recognised by the Queen, with the list of those honoured released on Saturday.
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HarperCollins Book Publishers filed legal papers on Friday against the company Gawker Media after they refused to remove pages from Palin’s second book America By Heart: Reflections On Family, Faith And Flag from their website.
on Saturday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Gawker, saying it had to take down the pages — which it did, removing the images and commentary relating to them — most shockingly, perhaps, without making any further comment.
Publisher HarperCollins — which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns Fox News, the network that employs Palin as a commentator — brought the suit in New York district court on Friday.
HarperCollins Publishers spokeswoman Tina Andreadis told the Wall Street Journal Saturday evening, “We see the ruling as a victory. Gawker shouldn’t have posted this. It’s a copyright infringement. We are defending our author and our publication.”
But is it infringement? What harm was there in bringing Palin’s pages to light last week? The book is not in draft form — in fact, it’s completely finished and will be in bookstores on Tuesday. Barring some kind of strange machinations, every page that Gawker put on its website will be available for anyone interested to see in just a few days.
The hearing about Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s “America by Heart” is scheduled for Nov. 30.
According to The AP, a judge has now ordered Gawker to remove the offending pages until the issue has been resolved in court.
They had uploaded around 20 pages from the book to their site ahead of its publication date of November 23.
The lawsuit against Gawker will begin in a hearing on November 30.
The long ordeal of the 33 trapped Chilean miners is finally at an end – and the buzz about book deals and film rights to the men’s dramatic story has already begun.
The miners themselves are reported to have made a pact to collaborate on their own book, but in the UK the first book was signed up on Monday, before the rescue had even begun. Freelance journalist Jonathan Franklin, who has covered the dramatic story for the Guardian from day one, is to pen an account of the saga, provisionally titled 33 Men, for book publisher Transworld.
Franklin, who is an American but has lived in the Chile’s capital Santiago for 15 years, spoke about the book on his mobile phone from Chile, after 48 sleepless hours covering the emotional scenes as the miners emerged.
“This is one of the great rescue stories of all time,” he said, admitting he himself had wept as the first miners were released on Tuesday night. “It’s the reason we all want to be reporters: a remarkable story of the world coming together for a good reason. It taps into human altruism, the desire to work together, perseverance, faith that good things happen, never giving up.” The early chapters of the book, he said, were already written.
As a journalist, Franklin had had “a backstage pass to the whole thing. I was allowed to tape record the psychologist talking to the [trapped] men, I spent last night in the hospital talking to the [newly freed] miners.” He intends his book to reveal the characters of the miners themselves (“You could probably do a book on every one of them”) and reflect their black humour: one of the men played dead, for a joke, during the first 17 days spent in the collapsed mine without food, while another attempted phone sex with the nurse who was attending to him 700m above.
Transworld book publishers, a division of Random House, which bought 33 Men at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, said: “As far as I’m aware, Franklin is the only print and publishers journalist in the inner circle at the mine, party to a lot of the strategy and to the stories of the relatives at the top, the wives and girlfriends.” He added: “What I think is really interesting, apart from the drama of the story itself, is the miners’ lives in this isolated outpost in Chile, which is a bit like the Wild West. People seem to live by their own rules, and it’s a very rugged existence – tough people living in a tough place.”
The publication date for the book is still to be confirmed. “It’ll be sooner rather than later, but I don’t want Franklin to compromise the depth and breadth of the story by making it a rush job,” Scott-Kerr said.
Literary agent Annabel Merullo at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, who is handling the book, said it had also sold to France and Germany, with self publishing film interest from the US.
“It’s happened so quickly,” she said. “When the story broke, we talked about it at the agency and said, ‘Is there a book in it?’ We decided there only was if we could get someone really good to write it. Jonathan’s coverage was so much better than everyone else’s. He has incredible access at the mines and he’s covered the story from day one.”
By: Anastasia Goodstein,
on 8/3/2010
MTV unveils 'MTV Crashes' (A global music event series that kicks off next month with Sean 'Diddy' Combs in Glasgow. Also ABC Family launches 'Chatterbox' iPad app to facilitate virtual fan viewing parties. ) (MediaWeek UK) (MediaWeek)
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