Howe’s ‘exceptional’ Foretokens took the main £10,000 award, while Nur Turkmani, Tara Bergin and Biff Smith swept up the remaining categories

Sarah Howe has won the Forward prize for best collection, one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards, for Foretokens, a collection that explores new parenthood, the death of her father and her mother’s early life in Hong Kong.

Howe was announced as the winner during a ceremony hosted by Joelle Taylor at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday evening, and will receive £10,000.

Foretokens by Sarah Howe (Vintage Publishing, £12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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© Photograph: Marc Lixenberg

© Photograph: Marc Lixenberg

© Photograph: Marc Lixenberg

Jonathan Bailey, Ella Purnell, Aimee-Lou Wood, Maggie Gyllenhaal and more bring shock and gore to an immersive retelling with real bite

Do we really need another retelling of Bram Stoker’s fabled horror novel, which has already yielded multiple films, plays and radio dramas? Perhaps not, but this new audio version of Dracula, directed by Mary Lambert and adapted by Robyn Aherne, justifies its existence with an unusually star-studded cast, a streamlined story and an immersive and frequently nightmarish sound palette.

Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey is smooth and charismatic as the eponymous count who invites a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker (Louis Partridge), to his castle in Transylvania to assist him with the sale of a property. There, Harker becomes increasingly uneasy as he glimpses the count’s diabolical powers and realises that he is, in fact, a prisoner.

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© Photograph: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images for Netflix

© Photograph: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images for Netflix

© Photograph: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images for Netflix

The plan to generate revenue from areas currently used by the public is causing bitter dispute, and raises fundamental questions

In a crowded country that is short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused in any way is vulnerable. Professional critics of state spending can claim taxpayers’ money is being wasted. Managers of the building who are under financial pressure can argue it needs to be used more intensely, perhaps that some spaces should be commercialised and offered for rent. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building can be steadily sliced away.

The British Library in London is in danger of that fate. A huge brick battleship moored on the Euston Road since 1997, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its both forbidding and exhilarating exterior conceals 11 unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms and one of the world’s most extensive print and digital collections, free to use for anyone who is over 18. Last week, these readers received an email with the subject line, “Transforming your Library”. Next summer, the library would “begin work on repurposing our [three] Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace … available for hire by workers and businesses for co-working, collaboration and meetings”. The reason given for removing more than a quarter of the library’s much-loved research space was “ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free”.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

The constraints of Kureishi’s life after a devastating accident infuse his writing with a new and thrilling immediacy

Some months after returning home, after a grim year in hospitals in Rome and London, Hanif Kureishi begins to rebel. Not against his family, or the physical reality of being tetraplegic (and how could he?), but the liberal homogeneity of Shepherd’s Bush. He gets a diamond stud in his left ear at Westfield shopping centre, a piercing that enraged his father when he was 17. He sends off for a Maga cap and wears both to the farmers’ market, hoping for vitriol but getting nothing. “These quiescent scumbags only cared about themselves and their shopping,” he grumbles. “Being a fascist is far less thrilling than I imagined.”

Kureishi’s “re-punking” after decades in the metropolitan elite remains an ongoing project, just one response to his paralysis after a fall on Boxing Day 2022. His memoir Shattered was written in the long shock of that severance from a former life, which left him with no movement in his hands or legs, “a Beckettian chattering mouth”.

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© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Though times are hard and days are dark, the former PM’s latest book reminds us of the fun to be had when a figure is so ridiculous but cannot see it

In these times of social and political division, it’s worth doing a quick audit of what keeps us together. Where, as we fight over what constitutes “wealth” and whether or not to go back in on Brexit, are the key sites of consensus? The Celebrity Traitors and the gloriousness of Nigella on Bake Off may offer one area of unity; you can say the words “David Attenborough” to any sample of the population and elicit exactly the same murmur of approval. But, as the recent history of the internet shows, the most forceful bonds are those forged against, rather than in favour of, something. With that in mind, let’s turn to our old friend Liz Truss.

It’s an unusual position, isn’t it, wondering if we might owe a debt of gratitude to the former prime minister who, after tanking the value of the pound in 2022 and otherwise carrying on with the efficacy of someone stopped at random in the street and given the keys to government, is widely regarded as the worst ever to have held office. Truss has a book out this week, her second since leaving office, entitled Bank Job: A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market and Brought Down the Government, and on the evidence of its early reception, it seems likely to prove even more successful in uniting disparate communities of Britain than her previous volume, Ten Years to Save the West.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

© Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

© Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Writers are being bombarded daily with invitations from fake book groups and offers to publicise their work. For the scamming industry, aspiring authors can be a soft touch

• This piece first appeared in the Dial

‘Hello Professor Snigdha Poonam,” the email began. I read that again. Nobody has ever called me “professor” for the obvious reason that I am not a professor. Bracing myself, I read on. The email was from Timothy Firth, organiser of a Seattle-based life-drawing community with 1,943 members that regularly has “thoughtful discussions inspired by creative works”. A recent inspiration was my first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World. The group wanted to discuss it, the email said, at one of its upcoming meetups. Attendees would be encouraged to post reviews on Goodreads and Amazon after.

I looked up CAM Life Drawing and found an events page and an Instagram account. The latter had some photos of Timothy Firth – white, male – as well as testimonials from members who said he worked “day and night to create more community space”. Something told me this wasn’t the man who had reached out to me.

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© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Guardian Design

© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Guardian Design

© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Guardian Design

Move over Oasis – 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets to a masquerade ball to celebrate the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, while specialist bookshops catering for the genre report huge sales

When The Spicy Librarian, a romance bookshop in Leamington Spa, announced a masquerade ball to celebrate the new Sarah J Maas novel, 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets. “We sold out within 13 minutes,” says the shop’s co-founder Ali Maynard James. “As soon as tickets went on sale, our website crashed”.

The shop was one of many across the UK marking the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, the first instalment of Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series in more than five years. On Monday night, bookshops threw parties and opened past midnight – and The Spicy Librarian hired a stately home to mark the occasion.

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© Photograph: Beth Melvin

© Photograph: Beth Melvin

© Photograph: Beth Melvin

From AI aunties to long diaspora Uber phone calls, here is a selection of our favourite editions to celebrate our second anniversary

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The Long Wave is two! And over the past year, once again, it has surprised us with the breadth of stories and events in the diaspora.

The Long Wave has also evolved into a large community, with many readers getting in touch and sharing their thoughts, tips and sometimes their polite disagreements. We welcome and relish all of it. Here is the team’s selection of our favourite editions.

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© Illustration: Dakarai Akil/The Guardian

© Illustration: Dakarai Akil/The Guardian

© Illustration: Dakarai Akil/The Guardian

Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave put in the performances of their lives in this film originally banned for obscenity that highlights the violence of power

‘I could never be Satan’s boy. I haven’t the humility.” The speaker is Father Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century French priest accused of witchcraft, stylishly played by Oliver Reed, in Ken Russell’s scabrous 1971 classic; it is now restored and rereleased in its complete form after years of censorship. It comes from an era when movies, playing in high-street cinemas, still had the power to shock, to position that shock in the polite cultural mainstream and to compel serious discussion about whether that shock – or, conversely, a ban – was justified.

The Devils is based on a true story of politically directed mass hysteria, adapted by Russell from two literary works: Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s stage play The Devils. Of course it is obscene; obscenity is the glowing sulphurous paint which Russell is applying to the canvas. It is about obscenity – but the obscenity does not reside in the sexualised images of the crucified Christ or naked nuns disporting themselves; it is the violence of authority that is shown to be obscene. The idea of martyrs or heretics being burned at the stake has long been an accepted fact recounted in U-certificate history lessons, and a punishment which survived well into the European enlightenment. Russell shows you what it might actually look like and that is to involve a confrontational assault on good taste.

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© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Events in Ireland explore origins of Gulliver’s Travels, the Dublin clergyman’s book that became an instant hit in 1726

In March 1726, an Irish clergyman visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver a manuscript to a publisher under cover of night. The dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted to publish it anonymously.

His name was Jonathan Swift and the story was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The satirical work was published that October and is better known 300 years on as Gulliver’s Travels.

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© Illustration: Trinity College Dublin digital collections department

© Illustration: Trinity College Dublin digital collections department

© Illustration: Trinity College Dublin digital collections department

Workers tell WIRED that NOA—or “No Ordinary Assistant”—was unhelpful. Bestselling authors also say AI is ruining their relationships with Big Five publishers.

The author believes we are at a turning point as a species – and even in the shadow of big tech it’s up to us how we want to proceed

‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. “And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning.”

She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years – her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor’s travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots.

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© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

This audacious portrait of the French author through the eyes of his women is Shafak’s love letter to literature in dark times

In Frantumaglia, her collection of essays on writing and reading, Elena Ferrante writes that she has sometimes dismissed Gustave Flaubert as a “misogynist”, angered by his invention of as callous a mother as Emma Bovary. In other moods, however, she has wondered whether Flaubert allows his female characters to say what “women truly think and say and live but do not dare write”.

Ferrante’s ambivalence is, I think, the most fitting feminist response to Flaubert’s novel. It’s tempting to castigate him as a male writer who kills his female character because he can’t imagine any other end for a transgressive woman; to reproach him for not giving Emma Bovary the profundity of emotion with which Tolstoy imbues Anna Karenina. But this isn’t the whole story, because Flaubert was so complex a figure: restlessly self-doubting even as he more than held his own in an age of cocksure egos; ecstatically happy in his solitary states of aesthetic creation precisely because they could throw him outwards into other people’s stories and minds.

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© Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy

© Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy

© Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy

The actor waxes lyrical on directors, dildos and why she hates being referred to as though she’s a dusty old relic

In the late 1950s, Judi Dench was invited to meet a major Hollywood producer about a possible career in the film business. The producer looked at her for a long time and said: “Very nice to meet you but you’ll never make a movie because you have every single thing wrong with your face.” As she left his office, Dench – who was 23 and about to make her professional debut as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Old Vic – breathed a sigh of relief and resolved to concentrate on theatre. Though she dabbled in film and TV, it wasn’t until the 1990s that she became a bona fide movie star, playing M in the Bond films and winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. Yet, she notes: “Being onstage is where I feel safest. Yes, I’ve appeared in films, but I’d never consider myself a film actor.”

Dench’s reflections on her working life form the backbone of Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, a memoir built around her conversations with the actor and theatre director Brendan O’Hea, Dench’s friend with whom she also collaborated on 2023’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. This book confirms much of what is already known about Dench: that she is impishly funny, swears like a sailor, and that, despite that film producer’s unkind comments, she has “no hang-ups about what I look like on camera … Acting for me is not about looking glamorous. It’s whatever’s needed for the story.” We also learn that Dench, who is 91, can’t resist a prank: while playing Brecht’s Mother Courage at the Barbican in London, she replaced the drinks her character serves to two soldiers with cider vinegar – “It was a joy watching them knock it back, made even more glorious by the fact they had to ask for a top-up.”

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© Photograph: Paul Stuart

© Photograph: Paul Stuart

© Photograph: Paul Stuart

Events in Ireland explore origins of Gulliver’s Travels, the Dublin clergyman’s book that became an instant hit in 1726

In March 1726, an Irish clergyman visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver a manuscript to a publisher under cover of night. The dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted to publish it anonymously.

His name was Jonathan Swift and the story was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The satirical work was published that October and is better known 300 years on as Gulliver’s Travels.

Continue reading...

© Illustration: Trinity College Dublin digital collections department

© Illustration: Trinity College Dublin digital collections department

© Illustration: Trinity College Dublin digital collections department

A fatal mistake sparks this juicy melodrama, in which a philosophy professor navigates the guilt of being a survivor

What if, battered by cancer and cancer treatment, you decided to end your life? And what if it went wrong and you lived, but a friend died in your place? Would you tell the police the truth? Or reason that there’s no point punishing your grieving, bruised self any further, especially when – in the first bit of good news you’ve had for years – you learn that your treatment may finally be working?

It’s the kind of moral question that London philosophy professor Esther Luck loves throwing at her students. But Jude Cook’s third novel makes the dilemma bracingly personal. As it opens, Esther, who has ovarian cancer, is waiting in a toilet cubicle on the fifth floor of her university building – the only one without CCTV – for the arrival of her dodgy French ex, Michel. He has agreed to shoot through the door and end her misery. But someone else arrives first. Laura is the department’s fragrant superstar, with her BBC presenting gig and handsome barrister husband. She finds an empty stall, Michel gets the wrong door, and Esther is left guilty, panicked and alone on the loo as Laura’s blood pools on the floor.

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© Photograph: Sarah Raymond

© Photograph: Sarah Raymond

© Photograph: Sarah Raymond

In her new book, Envy, Stacy Kim explains how to understand the feeling, identify your deeper desires and use them to achieve your goals

In the 16th-century poem The Faerie Queene, envy is a ghoulish figure riding a ravenous wolf, sad to see the fortune of others and “wonderous glad” of their hardship. It’s not a flattering depiction; better to be thankful for what we have, rather than dwell on such a bitter and self-destructive feeling, right?

Maybe not. “I think that when we don’t examine our envy, that’s when it leads us astray,” says Dr Stacy Kim, social scientist, life coach and author of the new book Envy: Why Wanting What They Have is the Key to Getting What You Want. Kim wrote the book after seeing the way envy came up for her coaching clients and reflecting on the role it had in her own life. The book is informed by social science and philosophy research, as well as her personal and professional experiences.

Similar target: “You remind yourself: ‘Hey, the reason why I’m feeling this envy is because what I want is within my reach,’” she says.

Intangible desire, as mentioned above

Relevant comparison: Identify which specific domain – something you care about or already participate in – is relevant to your desires

Negative emotion: How long does it last? How intense is the message it’s sending? This tells us how important the feeling is.

Envy by Stacy S. Kim is out now. To support the Guardian, order your copy of the UK edition at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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© Photograph: Shannon Fagan/Getty Images

© Photograph: Shannon Fagan/Getty Images

© Photograph: Shannon Fagan/Getty Images

We would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month

As part of The Guardian’s “what we’re reading” series, we would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month.

Have you read a book in recent weeks – fiction or non-fiction – that you’d recommend? Tell us all about it below.

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© Photograph: stevecoleimages/Getty Images

© Photograph: stevecoleimages/Getty Images

© Photograph: stevecoleimages/Getty Images

A foreign affairs expert’s bleak assessment of the state of global security

Are we on the brink of a new world war? This bleak subject is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of our military and intelligence services. It’s an urgent theme, then, for the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman to explore in his latest survey of global diplomacy. Rachman draws his title from the expression, sometimes attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – the idea being that conflict doesn’t much care whether we like to think about it or not: it will come knocking on our doors regardless.

Clearly, humanity is in a particularly unsafe spot right now, but seeing our security issues laid out like this, catalogued and mapped and analysed, they seem almost overwhelming. To summarise: the most powerful, nuclear-armed states – the US, China and Russia – are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing “strongmen”, each of whom is playing with the nationalist “Great Again” politics epitomised by Trump. Democracy is being rolled back around the world, and even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right. The so-called rules-based international order and its institutions – the UN, the WTO, Nato – are being deliberately undermined by the aforementioned strongmen, and are as weak now as they have ever been.

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© Photograph: Cheng Chia Huang/Getty Images

© Photograph: Cheng Chia Huang/Getty Images

© Photograph: Cheng Chia Huang/Getty Images

"That's a 12-year-old view of the world."