4thWrite short story prize reveals ‘engaging and provocative’ 2021 shortlist

Seeking out the best new Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers, this year’s finalists range across continents to show ‘the best of what stories can do’

English Magic by Uschi Gatward review – exquisitely eerie withholding

A striking debut collection of unsettling short stories invites us to trust our imaginations

Rachel Cusk’s singular novel stands out on wide-ranging Booker longlist

Second Place is both timeless and up-to-the minute, with big names Richard Powers and Kazuo Ishiguro among strong international finalists

Booker prize reveals globe-spanning longlist of ‘engrossing stories’

Kazuo Ishiguro makes cut alongside Rachel Cusk and Richard Powers, and novels from Sri Lanka and South Africa compete with choices from the US and UK

A love from beyond the grave – Kurt Tong on his ‘ghost marriage’ photographs

His latest project, piecing together the story of a bereaved Hong Kong man who wed his dead fiancee, has won an award. The photogapher reveals how it began with the discovery of a trunk of keepsakes

Monique Roffey: ‘William Golding’s The Inheritors gave me ideas for how I could write a mermaid’

The Costa winner on the James Baldwin novel she most cherishes, devouring Willard Price adventures as a child, and the sex scene she wishes she had written

AK Blakemore wins Desmond Elliott prize for ‘stunning’ debut novel

The Manningtree Witches takes the £10,000 first novel award for its ‘clever and unexpected’ story of a 17th-century Suffolk village’s moral panic

Waterstones prize winner Elle McNicoll: ‘I never saw autistic girls in books’

The author was repeatedly told that no one wanted to read fun books with disabled heroes. Now she has won the £5,000 Waterstones children’s book prize for her debut, A Kind of Spark

Ali Smith wins Orwell prize for novel taking in Covid-19 and Brexit

Summer, written at speed last year, takes political fiction award while Joshua Yaffa’s Between Two Fires takes matching nonfiction honour

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop review – war and mental collapse

The International Booker prize winner is a brilliant, shifting tale of a Senegalese soldier’s descent into madness

International Booker winner David Diop: ‘It’s war that’s savage, not the soldiers’

The author of At Night All Blood Is Black discusses the unheard African voices of the first world war and the inspiration for his violent antihero

The Promise by Damon Galgut review – legacies of apartheid

The Booker-shortlisted novelist examines South Africa’s broken promises over the last three decades through the story of one white family

Jason Reynolds wins Carnegie medal for ‘breathtaking’ Look Both Ways

The UK’s most prestigious prize for children’s books goes to the US ambassador for young people’s literature, while Canadian Sydney Smith takes Kate Greenaway medal for illustration

Miles Franklin 2021: shortlist announced for Australia’s most prestigious literary prize

A theme of ‘destructive loss’ is shared by the six books shortlisted for the $60,000 award

Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga wins PEN Pinter prize

Author, who was arrested last year in Harare while protesting against corruption, is hailed by judges as a ‘voice of hope we all need to hear’