Chinese writer Can Xue and Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, both long-favoured contenders for the Nobel Prize for literature, are among nominees for the International Booker Prize for fiction. Can Xue’s “I Live in the Slums” and Ngugi’s “The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi” are among 13 books on the longlist for the 50,000 pound prize.

Italy marks Dante Day on Thursday on the 700th anniversary of the Divine Comedy author's death in Ravenna. The 'Supreme Poet' will be celebrated across the country with the highest-profile event being a televised reading of Canto XXV of the Paradiso by comic actor, director and Dante buff Roberto Benigni at the presidential Quirinal Palace at 19:10 in the presence of President Sergio Mattarella and Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, ANSA reported.

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” author John le Carre, who cast flawed spies on to the bleak chessboard of Cold War rivalry, has died aged 89.

French author Hervé Le Tellier has been awarded on Monday the Goncourt Prize for his novel L'Anomalie (The Anomaly), news wires reported. France's top literary honour was attributed by videolink owing to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) in Sofia, Bulgaria, will take part in the fifth edition of the initiative Poetry on the subway. It is an EUNIC event that makes the works of the greatest European poets known to passengers on the Sofia subway. Until 20 December, the verses will be present in the subway cars, in their original language and in Bulgarian.

Economics Nobel laureate and philosopher Amartya Sen has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, organisers announced on Sunday. Sen was chosen because he had "been dealing with issues of global justice as a thought leader for decades," the jury said, adding that his contribution to the fight against social inequality was more relevant today than ever before.

American poetess Louise Gluck was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, the Swedish Academy announced last Thursday. Her victory was considered to a certain extent surprising by many experts.

One of the most valuable traits of the Bulgarian national character, as far as such exists, is the ability to live along with the absurdity and to accept the paradoxes of human nature. This is not somethings that came out of good times. The logic of life is stronger than the logic of moral convictions, and survival has always been a priority for the Bulgarians, says writer Alek Popov in an interview to George Dimitrov.

Milan Kundera, the author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and many other acclaimed novels, will donate his private library and archive to a public library in Brno, the city where he was born and spent his childhood, news wires reported. The entire collection will be transported from Kundera’s apartment in Paris to the Moravian Library in Brno in the fall.

Leaving Bulgaria is not just a desire to get out of poverty and earn more money. It is something much more fundamental, which is obviously so significant that most of the emigrants are willing to pay a very high price to have it, Demetra Duleva says in an interview to EUROPOST.