The debut novel took the top prize while The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please was named children’s book of the year

A romantic-mystery debut novel, The Artist by Lucy Steeds, set against the sun-drenched backdrop of southern France, has been crowned the 2025 Waterstones Book of the Year.

Exclusive: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund, including unseen letters by Doris Lessing and a note from James Joyce saying that he ‘gets nothing in the way of royalties’, show authors at their most vulnerable

Set across a Provencal summer in 1920, Lucy Steeds’ The Artist follows an enigmatic painter, his niece and a British journalist.

The actor won best performance for BBC drama Gatsby in Harlem at the inaugural British Audio awards, while Nicola Coughlan’s narration of Juno Dawson’s Queen B clinched best sci-fi audiobook

IN FOCUS: As debates over the ‘disappearing’ young male novelist rumble on, some authors and critics push back against claims that fiction has closed its doors to men. Hannah Ewens learns that the real problem is less about publishing and more about a wider societal issue