ANDREW MOTION answers Twitter questions about Treasure Island, being Poet Laureate, sherry and the Queen!Designers SUE TIMNEY and STEVE DAVIES from Saatchi and Saatchi discuss their book cover designs for the new Vintage Classics series of modern classics launched in conjunction with the Victoria & Albert MuseumGraphic novelist SIMONE LIA talks about dating, a Welsh nunnery, INXS, and her new book Please God, Find Me A HusbandFormer Poet Laureate ANDREW MOTION reads two poems from Chinese political activist and Novel Laureate LIU XIAOBO's June Fourth Elegies - a collection of the poems Liu Xiaobo has written each year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Liu Xiaob...

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Today marks the exciting release of RHCP's brand new app for the bestselling Princess Poppy series. Available to buy for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, this magical interactive app will provide hours of perfect princess fun and delight for parents to share with their children. The app has been created by Random House and award-winning developer Robot Media and is available here.T...

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Three Random House authors have been included in the longlist for the Desmond Elliott Prize; SJ Watson (Before I Go To Sleep) and Rachel Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry), along with Vintage author Grace McCleen (The Land of Decoration).2012 marks the fifth anniversary of the £10,000 award for a first novel published in the UK, set up in memory of the celebrated publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott to 'enrich the careers of new writers'. The criteria of the Prize require longlisted novels to display confident and compelling narratives and feature original and arresting characters.This year's panel of judges is chaired by author Sam Llewellyn. He is joined by Tom Gat...

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Congratulations to Karen Russell, whose Swamplandia! has been named a 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Fiction. Denis Johnson and the late David Foster Wallace were also named as finalists. Swamplandia! tells the story of thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree's quest to save her family's island home and gator-wrestling theme park. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell's debut novel is an arrestingly beautiful and inventive work. As the New York Times reports, the Pulitzer committee has declined to select a winner for the 2012 prize.

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The Random House Group and Booktrack announced the launch of their first UK sound-enhanced ebook on the first day of the 2012 London Book Fair (April 16th, 2012).Sir Andrew Motion’s Silver: Return to Treasure Island, his sequel to the classic Treasure Island, which was published in hardback by Jonathan Cape, pat of The Random House Group, last month, was chosen as the launch title. The ebook version will come with optional sound effects such as wasps buzzing, bacon sizzling and trees swaying, in addition to music.Sir Andrew said: “I am excited that SILVER will be appearing in a BOOKTRACK edition and I hope that this groundbreaking digital format encourages new readers (and old) t...

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The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco and translated by Richard Dixon has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.The winner will be announced at a reception in London on 14th May, and the winning author and translator will share the £10,000 prize.Soon-to-be Chatto author Yan Lianke also appears on the shortlist; Chatto will publish his novel, Lenin's Kisses, in spring 2013.The full shortlist:Alice by Judith Hermann, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo (The Clerkenwell Press)Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M Green (Alma Books)Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Cindy ...

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Anne Enright's acclaimed novel The Forgotten Waltz (Cape/Vintage) has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012.The shortlist was revealed at the London Book Fair this morning. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on 30th May, with shortlist readings at the Southbank Centre on 29th May.The full shortlist is as follows:Esi Edugyan - Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail) Canadian / 2nd NovelAnne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz (Jonathan Cape) Irish / 5th NovelGeorgina Harding - Painter of Silence (Bloomsbury) British / 3rd NovelMadeline Miller - The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury) American / 1st NovelCynthia Ozick - Foreign Bodies (Atlantic Books) ...

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Vintage Classics, an imprint of The Random House Group, has announced the launch of a new list – Vintage Children’s Classics – aimed at and shaped by 8 to 12 year olds and the adults in their lives. It will be a beautiful and affordable series of books intended to inspire and nurture a life-long love of reading.The launch list of twenty titles will be published in August 2012 and will feature perennial favourites such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island alongside much-loved contemporary classics exclusive to Random House including The C...

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The Random House Group today announced it has signed with digital innovators Small Demons to become its first publishing partner in the UK.Small Demons lets people explore and discover books in new ways by extracting and displaying all the people, places and things mentioned within them.Using a mixture of machine intelligence and human touch, Small Demons identifies and cross-references every person, place, song, book, film, food, drink, gadget and more. Readers can then use those references to enrich their reading experience by diving deeper into the story, or use them to find other books which share the same references.The first of the Random House Group UK titles to go live on the site is...

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Landed by Tim Pears is one of ten novels shortlisted for the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award, managed by Dublin City Libraries.  The award is worth €100,000 and is the world's most valuable annual literary award for a single work of fiction published in English. Announcing the shortlist in Dublin today, The Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr. Andrew Montague, Patron of the Award said: "These ten novels have been shortlisted from a total of 147, nominated by 162 public library systems in 45 countries worldwide and represent the best of readers' recommendations."  The 10 shortlisted titles were nominated by public libraries in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Repu...

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