Judge of prestigious award says two best collection winners ‘address the urgent challenges of our time’

Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie have been named joint winners of this year’s Forward prize for best collection, one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards, marking the first time in the prize’s history the honour has been shared.

Ravinthiran, who was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and now lives in the US, was recognised for Avidyā. The collection is described as having emerged from “journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries”. The Canadian poet Solie shared the prize for Wellwater, a “self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink”.

I was a mess of insecurities, trying to hide thinning hair, worried I was ageing too quickly. Then a scene in the TV show Kidding changed everything

Growing up, I was obsessed with Jim Carrey. I was just entering my teens when The Mask came out, and I can still picture myself watching Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls on TV one weekend afternoon, absolutely howling at the silliness of it. His elastic facial expressions, the energy, the stunts – it was the perfect tenor of humour for a young boy.

By the time I was in college, I had moved on to his more thoughtful films. The Truman Show was a favourite: still funny, but with a philosophical edge that spoke to me at the time. I loved seeing Carrey stretch into more serious roles, and as the internet made it easier to watch interviews, I came to admire him as a person, too.

Drawn mostly from notebooks discovered in the attic of the late novelist and philosopher’s Oxford home, a new collection spans 60 years and touches on deeply personal themes

A previously unpublished series of poems by the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch is to be printed, shedding new light on her life and relationships, and marking the first time the writer’s bisexuality has been explored in her published works of fiction or poetry.

Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.

Ahead of the BBBF this weekend, authors who’ll be in attendance explain the crisis in publishing of Black writing, and why coming together is the solution

On Sunday morning, the Barbican’s vast concrete foyer will swap its usual quiet for a buzz of conversation and excitement, and a particular kind of cultural energy: Black British storytelling in all its multiplicity.

Now in its fifth year, the Black British book festival (BBBF) has become Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature. What began as a small, intimate gathering has grown into a national institution attracting thousands of attendees and some of the biggest names in publishing.

As machine-made books flood online marketplaces, a new UK initiative is introducing an Organic Literature stamp to help readers identify books created by real authors

A new UK start-up is taking aim at the growing wave of AI-generated books, launching an initiative to verify and label human-written works.

Books By People has launched an “Organic Literature” certification, partnering with an initial group of independent publishing houses.

The Emmy-winning actor will work with psychologist Orly Klein to compile the letters into a book exploring masculinity and the challenges facing boys today

Stephen Graham, the Emmy-winning actor best known for Netflix hit Adolescence, has launched a new project asking fathers to write letters to their sons about what it means to be a man, to form a book about masculinity.

The project invites fathers around the world to write personal letters to their sons, reflecting on their experiences of fatherhood. Graham will work with psychology lecturer Orly Klein to compile Letters to Our Sons, a book due to be published by Bloomsbury next October.

To submit a letter, visit letterstooursons.co.uk