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RLF Writers’ News: April 2026

Publishing

Dr Marianne Colbran’s new non-fiction book Policing and The Media: Representations of the Police in News, Television Police Drama, Documentaries and Beyond will be published on 22 April by Routledge.

Having started her screenwriting career writing for a police show, Marianne became fascinated by the stories we tell through news and drama about crime and punishment. She is now a criminologist at Edinburgh alongside her RLF Fellowship. This book brings together her research for the last 10 years, to explore questions around the media’s continued portrayal of the police as society’s protectors, particularly in the light of repeated police brutality towards Black citizens and the murders of Sarah Everard in the UK and George Floyd in the US.

Nick Bradley’s new novel The Second Life of Professor Takahashi has been acquired by Doubleday.

Set across four intertwining strands, the novel follows a lonely professor called Professor Takahashi; his restless daughter, Kaori; the game she cannot stop playing; and the woman who draws them together. Doubleday’s Editorial Director Bobby Mostyn-Owen calls The Second Life of Professor Takahashi  “an immersive, big-hearted, visionary novel about what it means to be seen, and what it costs to reach for someone across the silence.”

Productions

Stephen Sharkey‘s new translation and adaptation of Berthold Brecht’s riotous 1941 ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, has just opened at the RSC.

Double Olivier Award-winner Mark Gatiss makes his RSC debut as the notorious Arturo Ui, in a production that also features new music composed by British rock band Placebo.

Brecht’s play is a blistering satire on Hitler’s ascent to power set in Chicago during the Great Depression. Sharkey’s adaptation is directed by Seán Linnen and will be showing at the RSC’s Swan Theatre until 30 May. Buy tickets here.

Collected: Live 

This month’s Collected: Live panel events include:

• The Future of Literature at Glastonbury Library with writers Rebecca Tantony, Vanessa Kisuule and Jane Borodale on Saturday 11 April. Tickets here.
• Writers Who Inspire Us at Liverpool Central Library on Friday 24 April. Writers Caroline Corcoran, Sophie Duffy and Zoe Howe will discuss the writers who inspire them, in connection with the 2026 Year of Reading. Tickets here.
• For Crime and Country at Hexham Library, as part of the Hexham Book Festival, on Saturday 25 April. Writers David Mark and Saima Mir will be in conversation with Harry Man for a special discussion based on the RLF’s Collected: The Podcast series. For tickets, visit the Queen’s Hall Arts Centre website.
• What do writers do all day? Meg Sanders and Michael Woods will be in conversation with Leila Rasheed at the next Collected: Live Midlands event, held at Kings Norton Library in Birmingham, also on Saturday 25 April. The event will be followed by an audience Q&A. More information here.

Events

Francis Spufford and Clare Chambers will be talking about their work as part of the Fishbourne Literary Festival in Sussex on Saturday 11 April.

Clare Chambers will talk about her latest book, Shy Creatures, alongside fellow novelist Lissa Evans. Both set their novels at times of significant social change, which they will discuss as part of the event Visions of Postwar England.

Francis Spufford will be in conversation with Mark Hoult about his new book Nonesuch, a literary fantasy set in the wartime London of 1940.

A number of RLF writers will be taking part in this year’s Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, over the weekend of 10 – 12 April including:

• RLF beneficiary Adam Weymouth, who will talk about his book, Lone Wolf, one of six books shortlisted for the inaugural Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, on Friday 10 April.
• RLF Fellow Dan Richards will discuss his book Overnight on Saturday 11 April.
• Former RLF board member Margaret Busby will talk about her new book Part of the Story, also on Saturday 11 April.
• RLF Fellow Horatio Clare will talk about his book, We Came by the Sea, on Sunday 12 April.

Ade Solanke is taking part in the 2026 Fulbright Eccles Lecture panel, Stages Across the Atlantic: Theatrical Exchange, Past, Present and Future, presented by the US-UK Fulbright Commission in partnership with the Eccles Institute for the Americas.

The event will explore the dynamic exchange of theatrical ideas between the UK and the USA and be chaired by actor, filmmaker and Fulbright-John Wood LAMDA awardee, Ramsden Madeus. Ade Solanke – playwright, screenwriter, Fulbright Scholar and historian of Black Theatre – will also be joined on the panel by Kate Dossett, to examine how transatlantic collaboration has shaped performance, production, and cultural narratives on both sides of the ocean.

The event will take place on Thursday 16 April at the British Library. For more information and to buy tickets, visit the British Library website.

Andrew Miller will open the Cambridge Literary Festival on Wednesday 22 April. In conversation with broadcaster Alex Clark he will discuss his latest novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Land in Winter, which also won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Much-acclaimed for its evocative descriptions of time and place, The Land in Winter is set during the infamous winter of 1962–63, the harshest in living memory. As blizzards close in on a West Country village, secrets surface and lives are changed. Buy tickets here.

Also appearing at the Cambridge Literary Festival is Margaret Busby, former RLF beneficiary and board member.

She will be appearing at two events on Saturday 25 April:

• As part of the panel Writers on Reading, a discussion with Samira Ahmed and Sam Leith in celebration of the 2026 National Year of Reading. Tickets here.
• In conversation with Tanjil Rashid about her book, Part of the Story. Tickets here.

WritersMosaic contributor Lanre Bakare will discuss his book, We Were There – an in-depth look at how Black culture, resistance and community has shaped modern Britain – as part of the Ealing Book Festival on Friday 24 April.

As this year’s Huntley Archive Talk, Lanre will be in conversation with Dr Margaret Andrews, a Patron of the Friends of the Huntley Archive which celebrates the pioneering work of Eric and Jessica Huntley who founded one of Britain’s first Black bookshops and later publishing houses in West Ealing 50 years ago.

Tickets here.

Also at the Ealing Book Festival will be RLF beneficiary Hanif Kureishi.

In a special hour-long event Hanif will discuss his memoir, Shattered, which details his recovery following a life-changing fall on Boxing Day 2022. This fall resulted in Hanif receiving a spinal cord injury which has meant that he can no longer walk or use his hands.

For tickets to the event, which takes place on Sunday 26 April, visit the Ealing Book Festival website.

Jill Dawson will be in conversation about her new novel Pixie, which explores the story of real-life figure of Pamela ‘Pixie’ Colman Smith, the illustrator of the still-iconic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, in an event for the Cambridge University Creative Writing programme.

The online discussion, chaired by Dr Midge Gillies – Cambridge Creative Writing Tutor and another RLF Fellow – takes place on Tuesday 28 April, from 7-8pm. Tickets are free, but registration is required.

More information here.

Awards

Patrick Ness has been shortlisted for the Best Writing Medal for his latest book, Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody, in the 2026 Carnegies.

The Carnegies are the UK’s longest-running children’s book awards. Patrick has previously won a Carnegie Medal twice.

This year’s winners will be revealed at a live-streamed ceremony on 23 June. More information here.

RLF beneficiary Adam Weymouth and RLF Fellow Kapka Kassabova are two of six writers shortlisted for this year’s Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing.

Weymouth’s book Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe sees him follow in the footsteps of a wolf, throwing unique light on Europe’s mountainous hinterlands. Kassabova’s Anima: A Wild Pastoral explores her time with the last moving pastoralists in Europe.

This year marks the first annual Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing. The winner will be awarded £10,000 and will be announced at a special event at this year’s Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, on Sunday 12 April.

More information here.

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