A wide spectrum of authors - in age, gender, politics and style - is represented on the shortlists for the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, announced on Monday.

A collaboration between writer James Roy and refugee advocate Noel Zihabamwe has led to friendship and a prestigious book award.

Unlike some previous winners of the Patrick White Award for Australian writers who have not received their due recognition, several of Carmel Bird's books are still in print.

The series, based on the novel by Sydney author Liane Moriarty, will premiere on HBO next year.

Jimmy Barnes' memoir stays at the top of the bookshop charts.

Academic and author Carolyne Larrington has a fair idea of how the blood-and-guts fantasy will wrap things up.

Australian author Carmel Bird reveals the works that shaped her.

Mark Brandi's unpublished manuscript has won a gong at the British crime-writing awards but he wasn't sure it was actually a crime novel.

Awards will help with Christmas shopping.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

The morphing path to malapropisms.

South Africa is the setting of this powerful tale of displacement.

Australia's top-selling military and history books.

Kim Mahood, an artist who writes exceptionally well, is fond of the expression "paying attention".

Clementine Ford's arguments about how and why women should fight back at their treatment in society is No. 1 in the independent bookshop charts.

The author hopes she won't regret the risk she took in writing her latest memoir.

For both Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Barnes the rock'n'roll escape is a death-defying miracle, which is emblematic of their generation.

Maggie Joel has been writing fiction for 20 years and her short stories have been widely publisher in Australian literary magazines and on ABC radio. The Safest Place in London (Allen & Unwin), her fourth novel, tells the story of two families whose lives are changed by the London Blitz in World War II.

James Kelman is hugely influential as an author for good reason and Dirt Road is a fine example of his work.

Steven Marcuson's The Bunting Quest has similarities to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, except that it's better.

Laura Bloom's The Cleanskin lays bare the personal cost of sectarian conflict.

Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens is a whip-smart satire on a generation born into a perfect storm of privilege and disappointment.

Even grown-ups want to believe in fairytales, as a journalist found when public outrage greeted his "unmasking" of the best-selling Italian novelist Elena Ferrante this week.

It's 1923, and Hitler suddenly decides he needs to boost his national profile.