Ellen Holgate will move to Bloomsbury UK Children’s as editorial director for fiction in mid-January. She is currently senior editor at Hodder Children’s.
Once again, the Obama family celebrated “small business Saturday” with a bookstore shopping trip. This time they visited One More Page Books in Arlington, VA, where the White House says President Obama bought 15 children’s books to give as gifts. (The president indicated he had prepared a shopping list that he consulted on his Blackberry while in the store.)
Kensington and Chelsea became the second London borough to approve plans to demolish the Earl’s Court exhibition center in order to replace it with approximately 7,500 homes, as well as shops and more. Certain additional approvals are still required, however, and none of the many accounts in the UK press indicate a projected date for taking down the currently facilities. In a statement that reads a little optimistically, Reed Exhibitions insists they have venue secured for the London Book Fair for 2013 and 2014.
Australian author Bryce Courtenay, 79, died on Friday of stomach cancer, two weeks after publication of his latest novel. He is best known for his first novel, The Power of One, which is said to have sold over 8 million copies.
Actress Deborah Raffin–who co-founded audiobooks publisher Dove Books with her then-husband Michael Viner in the mid-1980s–died last Wednesday at age 59, from leukemia.