News of note for readers: August 19, 2025

Catch up quick with the bookish news of the past few days ... or take a deeper dive into each story. Your choice! 

Controversies

• Novelist Sally Rooney's pledge to donate to Palestine Action could make her vulnerable to arrest, as the United Kingdom has designated that group as a terrorist organization (The Guardian).

• A test screening audience has described an upcoming movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, as “sexually explicit” and “tonally abrasive” (The Independent).

Awards

• The winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards, which honor excellence in science fiction, were announced over the weekend (Book Riot).

• Meanwhile, we won't have a 2025 Polari Prize winner; the withdrawal of sixteen authors (out of twenty-four) and two judges over the nomination of a self-described trans-exclusionary radical feminist has resulted in the organizers deciding to "pause" the prize this year (The Guardian). 

Language

• Gen Alpha and many slang words it's fond of, including skibidi, delulu, and tradwife, are among the latest additions to the dictionary (Cambridge Dictionary). 

• Robin Lakoff, a linguist whose research essentially created the academic field of language and gender studies, died August 5 at age eighty-two (The New York Times).

Excerpts

• Read an excerpt of Philippa Gregory's Boleyn Traitor, which follows the sister-in-law of Anne and Mary Boleyn (stars of her earlier novel, The Other Boleyn Girl); the novel comes out October 14 (Entertainment Weekly).

• You can also read an excerpt from Dani Francis's upcoming book, Broken Dove, which comes out May 5 and continues the story from her debut work, Silver Elite (People).