Great Regulars: After winning Germany's major award the

Goethe prize earlier this year, Syrian poet Adonis has emerged as the frontrunner to be crowned Nobel literature laureate next month.

Ladbrokes has made the 81-year-old, described as "the most important Arab poet of our time" by the Goethe jury, its 4/1 favourite to win this year's Nobel prize for literature, ahead of another octogenarian poet, the 80-year-old Swede Tomas Tranströmer, at 9/2.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: Adonis declared Nobel prize for literature favourite

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William Sitwell, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell's great-nephew and guardian of their estates, said the project was "fantastic" and one his great aunt and uncle--a travel writer and poet--would have relished. "The key thing for poets, especially dead ones, is to try and encourage as many people as possible to read them and to give access to as many people as possible," he said. "This is something [Edith and Sacheverell] would have loved. The Sitwells were always great promoters of young artists and were always very keen to rock the establishment in challenging people's perceptions and encouraging young people to wake up and get interested in art. Bloomsbury Reader is doing exactly that--it's very much the spirit of what they would have liked and I think it is unbelievably exciting."

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: New Bloomsbury digital imprint revives hundreds of neglected classics

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A prisoner in an Alabama jail has claimed in a lawsuit that his jailers prevented him from reading a Pulitzer prize-winning book about America's racial history, thereby violating his civil rights.

Kilby Correctional Facility inmate Mark Melvin says he was sent Douglas Blackmon's award-winning history book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II in September 2010, but was told he was not allowed it, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by the Equal Justice Initiative in the US district court for the middle district of Alabama. The news comes as the US marks Banned Books Week, an annual nationwide celebration of the right to read.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: US prisoner forbidden to read Pulitzer-winning history book

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