I hope everyone who celebrates had a lovely Easter and Holi, and a wonderful Eid al-Fitr to come next week to all who celebrate that!
- What do South Africa’s former first couple, Black inexpression, and Uyghur poets have in common? Books about or by them were all National Book Critics Circle Award winners this month! The Penderyn Music Book Prize was also handed out to Reach for the Stars, about British pop music from the Spice Girls onwards. We keep tabs of all the various prizewinning books in our highlights list here, if you’re ever wondering what to get as a gift or are stuck for something inspiring to read.
Speaking of awards, congratulations to Dutch author Jente Posthuma, and her English translator Sarah Timmer Harvey, for their inclusion on the longlist of the International Booker Prize with What I’d Rather Not Think About.
- All you Murakami fans will be thrilled that a new book has been announced for this autumn! Its title is The City and Its Uncertain Walls, and you can already pre-order it on abc.nl.
- Taylor Jenkins Reid tells the Guardian about the books of her life. And so does Kae Tempest (“I used to read David Icke. Imagine that.”)
- Gabrial Garcia Marquez’s last, unfinished novel, Until August, came out this month, and its publication was not without controversy.
R. I. P. Akira Toriyama, whose Dragon Ball is one of the driving forces behind the current popularity of manga and anime across the world, Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, and Daniel Kahneman, whose Thinking, Fast and Slow has been a staple of our ABC Favorites list since it was published.
- You can add Lauren Groff to the list of authors who’ve opened bookstores – all in the USA, though, sadly. Still, should you be in Florida perhaps you can stop in, before you drive off to Nashville for Ann Patchett’s store, and New York City for Emma Straub’s!
We may not be in the New York Times quite yet, but our €2.99 mini Book Lover tote has been causing quite a stir as well!
- And finally, let’s do a round-up of literary events in our neighborhood: slightly fangirling here over the fact that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda will be at ABC Amsterdam on 9 April for a booksigning. I’m a massive Monstress fan so I’ll probably be in line! On the same day, but in The Hague, Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah will be at BorderKitchen in the evening, for an interview about Afterlives.
