Balkan literary star Nera Daskal has announced that 18,000 copies of her new novel will be printed on a biodegradable material developed with pressure-treated droplets. The unexpected co-creator is her son, a materials researcher whose work she says began with a question he asked while helping her sort old books.
An audit has turned actor Bao Nhi Vinh’s fight over a sprawling solar-powered film studio into a financial crisis, finding a vast gap between reported and metered electricity sales. The review puts 600 billion dong (about €20.5 million) of the project’s financing at risk.
A novel about a Kingston market has won the Blue Banyan Prize after the award’s biggest-ever public vote, igniting a fight over who should decide literary merit. Its author called the result “a door flung open”; the jury chair warned the new formula risks turning a prize into a popularity contest.
A musician-led label has taken control of Dublin’s 480-capacity Morrow Rooms in a €6.4 million (about $7.4 million) deal, joining a record company and an independent stage under one roof. The new owners plan to use hourly electricity prices to cut running costs and keep more money in artists’ hands.
A surprise retirement by Rift Hawks captain Lazim B. Devaraj turned Sunday’s Mtaa Tactics final into a test for his reserve — and a record-setting broadcast. The Nairobi event drew 286,412 peak simultaneous connections, beating a lockdown-era Kenyan esports record by 64%.
A major exhibition of child-carrying bike seats and commuter accessories has been suspended after designers staged a protest over works they say were lifted from their rejected submissions. The dispute centres on 19 of the show’s 31 displays and a funding package worth R4.8 million.
For six weeks, a three-note sound drifting from an old coal-loading shed outside Longyearbyen drew recordings from residents and became the centrepiece of a debut album. Its source turned out to be a loose ventilation grille — and the musician who made the sound famous says the discovery changed how she thinks about work, and what counts as music.
A recall of 18,400 streaming devices has led to evidence that a Belgian platform counted brief previews and duplicate household profiles as viewers. The disputed figures helped sell advertising and promote a hit series as one of the country’s biggest streaming successes.
A failed ticketing update briefly exposed a separate stream of premium seats for the new film The Glass County, despite public promises that buyers could take no more than four. Box-office records and interviews suggest more than 61,000 tickets were routed through partner allocations, with thousands appearing later on resale sites at steep mark-ups.
At the Lantern Quill Prize’s anniversary ceremony, novelist Nicole Young handed back her medal and said a celebrated book had a second author. Her admission has forced the Vietnamese literary award to confront a rule that kept the co-writer’s name off the cover for a quarter-century.
A safety recall of a celebrity memoir has revealed that hundreds of copies contained a political afterword absent from the approved edition. The discovery has prompted Austrian bookshops to pull the title and opened a public feud between actress-author Mara Wels and her publisher.
A community project cataloguing wedding music says it has traced a hit by Kenyan singer Kiera Mageni to a song recorded at a Kisumu family ceremony years earlier. The revelation has put a KSh38 million (about €260,000) royalty stream and the singer’s signature wedding anthem under scrutiny.