The Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for literature, has named Mats Malm its new permanent secretary. The previous permanent secretary, Sara Danius, resigned last April after a sexual harassment and leaking scandal. Anders Olsson has been filling the role since last June. Malm, a professor of literary theory at the University of Gothenburg, joined the academy four months ago.
Katie Hope will join the Princeton University Press as marketing director in June, leading marketing and sales teams in Princeton and Oxford. She was most recently director of marketing and author relations at MIT Press.
Jake-Ryan Kent was promoted to publicist at Llewellyn Worldwide.
Bookselling
The WSJ celebrates the difficult road to survival of Atlanta’s A Cappella Books, now a “success story” due primarily to deriving about half of their sales from off-site events. Results have been improving for “most of the past seven years,” but even so the margins remain modest. In 2018, the store had pre-tax earnings of $37,000 on sales of $830,000 in sales. Their best year ever, 2017, had earnings of $74,000 on sales of $880,000. “Even in more profitable years, Frank Reiss says, his salary has never exceeded $50,000.” (Meanwhile, the story repeats the error of confusing ABA members — which includes Half Price Books, Hudson Books, and many others — with a count of independent bookstores.
A group of about 10 self-proclaimed white nationalists tried to disrupt an event at Politics & Prose in Washington D.C., where Jonathan M. Metzl was reading from his new book Dying of Whiteness. The protesters left quickly after chanting “this land is our land,” and did not damage the store. Owner Bradley Graham told the Washington Post, “We just let them have their say, expecting they would leave, and they did. It doesn’t often happen here. It’s a sign of the times.”
Film/TV
Lagardere Studios has an exclusive first-look rights deal to all French-language content uploaded to Wattpad for film, TV, and digital content. Lagardere Studios president and ceo Christophe Thoral said, “This collaboration with Wattpad Studios is a wonderful opportunity and provides our fiction producers in France with a new source of creation.”
Awards
The James Beard Foundation presented their book awards across 13 categories on Friday night, with Cocktail Codex
by Alex Day, Nick Fauchald, and David Kaplan, with Devon Tarby (Ten Speed Press) winning Book of the Year.
In the UK, the Women’s Prize announced its six title shortlist:
The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker
My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Milkman, by Anna Burns
Ordinary People, by Diana Evans
An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
Circe, by Madeline Miller
Penguin Random House is sharing US ceo Madeline McIntosh‘s book recommendations, with eight PRH titles billed as “Madeline’s Picks.”