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At the recent London Book Fair, one stand attracted a lot of attention with it’s bold, but single display and lots of copies of just one book.

Don’t steal this book had one simple message. If we allow AI companies to copy millions of books – and if you are a writer, we mean your books – without permission or payment – then there’s going to be nothing left.

As I’ve posted earlier, we – journalists, publishers, authors, trade unions – are all urging the Government not to legalise what has been referred to ‘large-scale theft’.

The book (left) lists thousands of individual authors who had already put their names to this fight. If AI companies don’t pay their will be empty pages – amply illustrated by the body of the book (right) consisting of hundreds of blank pages.

Unpaid writers, empty pages = no books for readers!

Don’t Steal This Book is supported by Fairly Trained, Society of Authors and the Publishers Association as well as every fair minded writer, publisher and reader in the land.

To celebrate World Book Night, The Reading Agency is asking everyone to join in reading from 7.00-8.00pm. This can be reading alone, or maybe you already have a book club meeting, perhaps listen to an audio book or read to the kids before they go to bed.

It’s important to make time for reading especially in this Year of Reading – and we’re not talking about the children. 1 in 3 people in England don’t read regularly for pleasure. So the plan is to get many more people to pick up a book, listen or talk about books. According to The Reading Agency 19% of readers say that reading stops them feeling lonely. Either way that’s a lot of people.

This year there are 6 more Quick Reads – short books from bestselling authors written in an easy to read style:

The Woman Next Door by Louise Jensen

The Last Bench by Carmel Harrington

Cell One by Leye Adenle

The Girl in the Picture by Rachel Hore

Sweet Charity by Rosie Goodwin

Hunger Pains by Derek Owusu

Check them out on the Reading Agency site. Last year they gifted 36,502 books, via 306 organisations across a whole range of people – prisoners, refugees, job seekers and many more. I’ll be review each of these titles shortly. Watch the time. Tonight 7.00pm.

The Poetry Society has announced the winners of the 2025 competition. The three finalists were selected from 21,254 poems – each and everyone read by the panel – submitted by 9,564 entrants (were you among them?) from 133 countries across the world.

First prize went to Partridge Boswell for his poem The Gathering. Second prize went to Damen O’Brien for Axe and the Third prize to Zoe Dorado for Badminton. There were also Commendations for seven other entrants.

According to the judging panel: Susannah Dickey, Ian Duhig and Denise Saul, they were ‘blown away’ by the winning poem by American poet, Boswell: ‘It slowly unfurls, becoming an ever more expansive interrogation of language and morality’, according to Susannah Dickey.

Ian Duhig said of Axe by Australian poet O’Brien: ‘the poem struck us with the energy of its execution, its mordant humour and percussive music of its diction’. While Denise Saul, commenting on Badminton by Californian poet Dorado: ‘This is a poem of circumstances, haunted by the past and the present… Ideas of masculinity and power are pulled apart…’

All the winning poems are included in an anthology published by the Poetry Society

The next National Poetry Competition launches in June and closes 31 October, 2026.