Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged policymakers to treat children’s reading as a “right” rather than a parental duty, warning that Britain is failing to understand the emotional and social value of reading, as new research shows a sharp decline in daily shared reading at home.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in his final laureate lecture, The Kids Are Not Alright, the children’s laureate linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media.

“Our children have been at the sharp end of two great crises: Covid, and just as damagingly, austerity,” Cottrell-Boyce said in his lecture. “We can talk all we like about [the importance of] bedtime stories … but what does that mean to a child with no bed? Or no space for a bed?”

He said that this “furniture poverty”, alongside housing insecurity, means that children are unable to build stable routines around reading. “You’re not going to Narnia because you haven’t got a wardrobe,” he said “Your clothes are stored in bin bags ready for the next move.”

New figures from BookTrust, released to coincide with the lecture, show that daily shared reading among families with children aged eight and under has fallen from 60% in 2021 to 49% in 2025. Yet the proportion of children who “like or love reading” has risen from 66% to 80% over the same period, suggesting that enthusiasm for books remains strong.

It comes as the UK celebrates the National Year of Reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates. The campaign includes launching the first Children’s Booker prize, with a judging panel chaired by Cottrell-Boyce. Three children aged 8-12 will be recruited to help adjudicate. The campaign also involves distributing 72,000 books to children in need, and fostering a “national mission” to make reading a daily habit.

Alongside economic pressures, Cottrell-Boyce told the Guardian about the impact of screens and social media on children’s attention. He said concerns about “addictive” tech platforms were now unavoidable, arguing that children’s attention is being captured by systems designed to maximise engagement.

“These kids are working for big tech,” he said. “We all are. But you’re working for someone who doesn’t love you, who is not going to pay you and doesn’t care how many hours you work. It’s a shocking situation we’ve got ourselves into.”

Referring to the growing legal and political scrutiny of technology companies, he added: “These platforms should bear total responsibility. I think these trials are a bit like the big tobacco moment.”

He added that we have failed to communicate what reading offers beyond literacy outcomes. “Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure,” he said.

Despite the scale of the challenges, Cottrell-Boyce said he remains optimistic about children’s reading habits and the work already being done in communities. “Pessimism is a luxury that we can’t afford,” he said. “I do feel optimistic. I’ve met amazing people and seen amazing practice that costs next to nothing.”

Cottrell-Boyce has used his two-year tenure as children’s laureate to promote his Reading Rights campaign, which argues that shared reading should be embedded in early years support, from health visitors to family hubs. The new children’s laureate will be announced in July.

Stormzy called reading a “superpower” as he backed an initiative aimed at encouraging people who don’t see themselves as readers to pick up a book.

The musician’s publishing imprint #Merky Books, which is part of Penguin, is publishing one of this year’s six Quick Reads – short, accessible books created “specifically for nonreaders, lapsed readers, people with short attention spans, and neurodivergent readers”, according to The Reading Agency, which has run the Quick Reads initiative for 20 years.

The #Merky Books title is Hunger Pains by Derek Owusu, which will go on sale for £1 in April, along with five other Quick Reads.

“Reading helped me when I was young and it still does today,” said Stormzy. “Books have the power to carry you through life.” The rapper said he is “really proud” that Owusu is taking part in the initiative. “His words will reach the people who need them most.”

“I encourage anyone who doesn’t usually read to pick up a Quick Read – because reading really is a superpower,” he added. “Music and books are both about finding your voice. We are all made of stories – they define who we are.”

Owusu’s book, coming in at 128 pages, centres on Ray, a fitness enthusiast whose “obsession takes its toll” – he turns to “a dangerous online community for support”, while his partner, Temi, a journalist, watches with concern, according to the publisher’s description.

“Having never read a book until the age of 24, I wish I had come across Quick Reads sooner,” said Owusu. “They’re accessible, affordable and gentle in their approach, allowing new or lapsed readers to find their way into the pleasure and fulfilment of reading fiction and nonfiction.

“I’m excited to be part of their legacy and to add my voice to something that helps people feel confident enough to pick up a book and look forward to spending time with it,” he added. Owusu is also the author of That Reminds Me, Losing the Plot, Borderline Fiction and the editor of Safe: 20 Ways to be a Black Man in Britain Today.

This year, The Reading Agency will launch Quick Reads as audiobooks for the first time, as well as giving half a million Quick Reads books to prisons across the UK. All Quick Read titles “go through a rigorous accessibility review process, including testing for readability, concentration, and suitability for adults rebuilding reading confidence”, according to the charity.

Along with Owusu’s Hunger Pains, the other Quick Reads titles being published this year are The Last Bench by Carmel Harrington, The Girl in the Picture by Rachel Hore, The Woman Next Door by Louise Jensen, Sweet Charity by Rosie Goodwin and Cell One by Leye Adenle.

Legalised assisted dying should “gradually” be extended to dementia sufferers, the author Ian McEwan has said.

McEwan was “shocked by the snow-drilling attempts” by those opposed to the UK’s assisted dying bill, he told a public book event in London, citing its more than 1,000 amendments. MPs and peers backing the bill now believe it is “near impossible” for it to pass the House of Lords before the end of the session in May due to alleged filibustering.

If passed, the bill would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales for adults with less than six months to live. “We’re not asking much,” said McEwan, who is a patron of Dignity in Dying.

“I like it when some bishop says on the radio: ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge,’ and I think yes, it is the thin end of the wedge”, because certain groups are “missing from it”, such as those with dementia. “It has to be physical pain”.

“My guess is that if we pushed it through with all the protections around it – of doctors and dispassionate people making judgments – we’ll look back on this and think, ‘Why did we ever let people die in agony?’”

Asked explicitly if he would add an amendment to extend assisted dying to dementia sufferers, McEwan said: “Gradually, yeah, I would. But I think it does require a lot more thought and the idea of living wills.”

“My mother used to say to me: ‘If I ever become really terrible, I’d like you to finish me off.’ But of course, that’s to commit murder as things stand. Imagine standing up in court and saying: ‘Well, she did say when we were on the beach 20 years ago …’”

McEwan spoke about dementia’s impact on his family – his mother Rose had dementia, as well as his brother-in-law and another close family member. “By the time my mother was well advanced and could not recognise anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead all at once. It was a terrible thing. And the burden on those closest is also part of the radioactive damage of it all.”

McEwan was speaking at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London, as part of its Conversation series, discussing his latest book, What We Can Know, in which dementia is a major theme. He has also written about dementia in previous novels, Lessons and Saturday.

The Atonement author also discussed the new novel he is working on, during a conversation about the ban on social media platforms for under-16s in Australia, and the measure’s potential adoption in the UK. The author said that he is beginning “to wish that the internet didn’t exist. I think back enviously to the 70s, where one of the great luxuries of civilisation – which is solitude – was bounteously available, and has been worn away, and now so much dark stuff is coming out of it. I’m trying to write a novel about this. The disappearance of childhood, or the sense of childhood being under escort.” He said that he was in favour of social media bans.

A major theme of What We Can Know is climate change: the novel is partly set in 2119, at which point Britain has become an archipelago, having been submerged by rising seas. McEwan said that while he has “never known the world in a worse state”, he maintains a “little streak of optimism that we’re going to scrape through”.

What We Can Know has an “emotional background” made up partially of despair, and partially of hope, said the author. If you have children and grandchildren, “you want the human project to survive”. Yet, there’s a “countervailing current” common to all old people, he said – in order to make sense of their lives, people think: “with the end of me, it’ll be the end of everything – ‘après moi, le déluge.’ Elderly pessimism is a very powerful constraint on clear thinking”. He sees What We Can Know as an expression of those “contrary forces”.

Nigerians have called for urgent reforms to the healthcare sector after the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 21-month-old son prompted an outpouring of grief and accounts of negligence and inadequate care.

In a leaked WhatsApp message, the bestselling author said she had been told by a doctor that the resident anaesthesiologist at the Lagos hospital treating her son Nkanu Nnamdi had administered an overdose of the sedative propofol.

Adichie and her husband, Dr Ivara Esege, have begun legal action against the hospital, accusing it of medical negligence.

For decades, the state of Nigeria’s public health sector has made national headlines with accounts of underpaid doctors carrying out surgeries by candlelight in the absence of power supply, patients paying for gloves and other missing basics, dilapidated facilities and nonexistent research departments. Those who can afford to seek care abroad typically do so.

There is also a dearth of emergency response services. When the former world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua survived a car accident in Nigeria in December, he was helped at the scene by bystanders, with no ambulance in sight.

Adichie’s sister-in-law Dr Anthea Esege Nwandu, a physician with decades of experience, has called for change.

She told Agence France-Presse: “This is a wake-up call, for we, the public, to demand accountability and transparency and consequences of negligence in our healthcare system.”

An exodus of medical personnel has exacerbated the situation, resulting in a doctor-to-patient ratio at the last count of 1:9,801. According to the health ministry, an estimated 16,000 doctors have left Nigeria in the last seven years.

‘The will of God’

As Nigerians at home and abroad mourned Adichie’s son this week and the Lagos state government ordered an inquiry, stories flooded social media about a crisis of errors by medical personnel.

In Kano state, authorities said they were investigating the case of a woman who died four months after doctors left a pair of scissors in her stomach during surgery. The woman repeatedly visited the hospital complaining of abdominal pain, but was only prescribed painkillers. Scans revealed the scissors just two days before she died.

For Ijoma Ugboma, who lost his wife in 2021, the tragedy felt painfully familiar. Peju Ugboma, a 41-year-old chef, had gone into hospital for fibroid surgery and died due to complications exacerbated by staff putting “the wrong setting of the ventilator [on] for 12 hours”, her husband said.

“Surgery on Friday, ICU on Saturday, dead on Sunday. I asked for the death certificate … but at that point I knew that I wasn’t going to let this thing go like that,” he told the Guardian.

Almost two years after Peju’s death, after a battle Ugboma said had tested him “mentally, emotionally and financially”, three of the four doctors in the operating theatre were indicted for professional misconduct.

The law firm of Olisa Agbakoba, a medical negligence lawyer with two decades’ experience, was one of two that represented the Ugboma family in court. He said in Nigeria there was no rigorous regulatory structure in place in the health sector.

“There is no requirement for routine submission of reports, no systematic inspections, and no effective enforcement of professional standards,” he said.

Agbakoba said his brother had undergone surgery by a physician who was not suitably qualified, resulting in sepsis that required a month-long treatment. “That was absolute incompetence,” he said.

Despite the abundance of medical malpractice claims, formal complaints and lawsuits remain remarkably low, partly because negligence is hard to prove. But many say there is also a cultural and spiritual dimension involved.

“People say it’s the will of God,” said Agbakoba. “They just go home and don’t talk about it … It’s underreported because many people don’t really do anything about it.”

Finding justice

Even when issues are escalated legally, medical personnel are reluctant to give professional opinions in court. Two of the three expert witnesses that testified for the Ugbomas live outside Nigeria.

“People told us they’d read through the case notes, they’d seen all the fault lines … but nobody wanted to talk and that is part of the rot in the system because there’s an unwritten oath of secrecy,” Ugboma said.

Some people are cautiously optimistic that the high-profile death of Adichie’s’s son will trigger an overhaul of the health regulatory framework.

For Ugboma, his long fight for accountability was worth it. “Right now, I can talk to my children and tell them I fought for their mother even in death,’ he said. “There’s justice out there if only one can persevere. It’s a marathon. But we can only have a better system if more people begin to challenge them.”

Britney Spears has responded to her ex-husband Kevin Federline’s claims in his upcoming memoir about their marriage, calling his depiction of her “extremely hurtful and exhausting”.

In You Thought You Knew, Federline details his two-year marriage with Spears and their divorce in 2007, which was followed by a protracted battle over custody of their two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James.

In the book, Federline claims he witnessed Spears use cocaine while breastfeeding, and that she sometimes behaved erratically around their children. In an excerpt published by the New York Times, Federline alleged their sons “would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep – ‘Oh, you’re awake?’ – with a knife in her hand. Then she’d turn around and pad off without explanation.”

Federline told the New York Times he had not spoken to Spears in years, but said he learned about her alleged behaviour from their two sons.

Federline also writes in the book about the conservatorship Spears was under between 2008 and 2021, which saw her father control her life and finances. The arrangement prompted Spears’ fans to form the #FreeBritney movement to have her independence restored.

While the #FreeBritney movement may have “started from a good place”, Federline writes in the book, “All those people who put so much effort into that should now put the same energy into the ‘Save Britney’ movement. Because this is no longer about freedom. It’s about survival.”

“This situation with Britney feels like it’s racing toward something irreversible,” he writes. “It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK. From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the 11th hour. Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change, and my biggest fear is that our sons will be left holding the pieces.”

On Wednesday, Spears disputed Federline’s depiction in a statement on social media.

“The constant gaslighting from ex-husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting,” the eight-time Grammy-winning artist wrote on X. “I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys.”

She said she felt “demoralised by this situation” and that she had seldom seen her sons, who are now 19 and 20 years old, in recent years.

“Relationships with teenage boys is complex,” she wrote. “They need to take responsibility for themselves. With one son only seeing me for 45 min in the past five years and the other with only four visits in the past five years. I have pride too. From now on I will let them know when I am available.”

“Trust me, those white lies in that book, they are going straight to the bank and I am the only one who genuinely gets hurt here,” she added.

She said she had been living a “sacred and private life” since she was released from the conservatorship.

In an earlier statement, a spokesperson for the pop star told the New York Times, “With news from Kevin’s book breaking, once again he and others are profiting off her and sadly it comes after child support has ended with Kevin. All she cares about are her kids, Sean Preston and Jayden James and their wellbeing during this sensationalism. She detailed her journey in her memoir.”

In Spears’ 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, the pop star claimed that, during their custody battle, Federline “tried to convince everyone that I was completely out of control”.

Keira Knightley said that she was “not aware” of demands to boycott JK Rowling prior to joining the cast of the new audiobook versions of the Harry Potter series.

Knightley was speaking to Decider to promote her new Netflix movie The Woman in Cabin 10 (in which she plays a Guardian reporter), and was asked if she knew that “some fans are calling for a Harry Potter boycott”.

Knightley said: “I was not aware of that, no. I’m very sorry. You know, I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure out how to live together, aren’t we? And we’ve all got very different opinions.”

She added: “I hope that we can all find respect.”

Knightley has been cast as Professor Dolores Umbridge in the Full-Cast Audio Editions of Harry Potter, alongside hundreds of other performers including Cush Jumbo (as the narrator), Hugh Laurie (as Albus Dumbledore) and Riz Ahmed (as Severus Snape).

Calls to boycott Rowling’s work have multiplied since her reaction to the UK Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of a woman, in which she posted a photograph of herself smoking a cigar on social media. Rowling subsequently said she didn’t want to have the actor Paapa Essiedu removed from the forthcoming Harry Potter TV show after he signed an open letter protesting against the ruling.

Rowling also recently responded to Emma Watson in the ongoing rift with Watson and her co-stars of the Harry Potter film series over trans rights, saying the actor is “ignorant of how ignorant she is”.

Actors Brian Cox, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Conti as well as the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce are among those calling for the home of William Wordsworth to be saved as a site of literary heritage.

The Romantic poet lived at Rydal Mount in the Lake District from 1813 to his death in 1850. The property has five acres of gardens which were designed by Wordsworth.

He had rented the house, but in the late 1960s it was bought by his descendants, and has since been open to the public for most of the year. However, after the Covid pandemic, visitor numbers dropped sharply and the house was put on the market for offers over £2.5m.

Wordsworth’s great great great great granddaughter, Charlotte Wontner, is now leading a campaign to encourage financial backers to step in and help preserve the house and gardens so that they can be kept open for the public.

“It’s too often we are losing our incredible links with the past and this is one major link to the past that we cannot lose”, said Succession actor Cox.

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“This forthcoming sale of Rydal Mount is a mistake”, said Margolyes. “It can be stopped. This treasure belongs to the nation – as much as it does William Wordsworth.”

Wontner, whose grandmother bought Rydal Mount in 1969, described it as a “living museum”. The gardens “are where Wordsworth wrote many of his poems and when people get there, there is this wonderful sense of being closer to the poetry.”

She said that Wordsworth’s poetry is becoming increasingly important because of his appreciation for nature and the environment.

Her cousin, Christopher, who is selling the house, is supportive of the campaign, she said. “We all have the same goal which is to find a way of keeping the house open to people. There may be other relatives who feel the same way and I hope they will get in touch.”

The house has “always been referred to, I think, as a place of solace, and that is an important thing nowadays. A place to just have a break from the everyday craziness.”

The Society of Authors (SoA) is calling on celebrities and the publishing industry to properly acknowledge the writers behind celebrity books, particularly those aimed at children.

In a statement published on Monday, the SoA – the largest trade union of writers, illustrators and translators in the UK – said that many celebrity titles, especially those for children, involve ghostwriters and other “co-creators”.

The union encouraged the publishing industry to “recognise and acknowledge the contributions which are made by all the creators involved, from the celebrities whose names encourage readers to pick up a book to the ghostwriters and, often, illustrators whose skills help to bring stories to life.”

“Credit where credit’s due should be the publishing mantra,” said Chris Bradford, author of the Young Samurai series. “Acknowledgement of the ghostwriter doesn’t take away from the celebrity’s kudos”, noting that Marcus Rashford’s books credit the footballer’s co-writer Carl Anka on the covers.

“There also needs to be fair recompense for the ghostwriter’s work,” Bradford added. “The celebrity’s name on the cover might sell the book initially, but it’s the content crafted by the ghostwriter that makes it a bestseller.”

Mark McCrum, who co-authored Somebody Someday by Robbie Williams, said it is “high time that ghostwriters got recognition for their hard and highly skilled work”. He said that “a ‘with’ or a byline” on the inside title page “is enough”, and “ideally joint mention with the named celebrity in any bestseller lists”.

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The SoA statement also acknowledged that encouraging children to read in the digital age can be “a challenge” and that celebrity books can help in starting a reading habit.

The organisation’s chair Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin welcomed the “growing trend” of celebrities publicly acknowledging ghostwriters, pointing to Chris Hoy often appearing with his ghostwriter Joanna Nadin at events, and rugby player Johnny Sexton bringing his ghostwriter Peter O’Reilly on stage at the Irish book awards when their book won sports book of the year.

Nadin said that working with Hoy was an “enriching, positive” experience, and that she was credited throughout the process. “We had hoped it would become a model for the wider industry, so it’s disappointing that only a few teams have followed suit.”

Responding to news of the SoA’s call for transparency in a post on social media platform Bluesky, journalist and Empireland author Sathnam Sanghera suggested that TV and radio shows interviewing celebrities about their ghostwritten books should “acknowledge that they are ghostwritten, rather than proffering fake news”.

The SoA’s call comes following writers expressing frustration in recent months about celebrities writing books at a time when author incomes are in decline. Last year, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown was criticised over her novel, Nineteen Steps, which was ghostwritten by Kathleen McGurl. While Brown publicly acknowledged McGurl’s work in an Instagram post, critics said that McGurl’s name “should be on the cover”.

More than 200 Indian academics, activists and journalists have published an open letter urging the Indian government to withdraw last week’s decision sanctioning the prosecution of the Booker prize-winning author Arundhati Roy under the country’s stringent anti-terrorism law.

“We … deplore this action and appeal to the government and the democratic forces in the country to ensure that no infringement of the fundamental right to freely and fearlessly express views on any subject takes place in our nation,” the group said in the letter.

One of the signatories, the history professor Ajay Dandekar, said the decision was unjustified. “The Indian constitution upholds Roy’s right to the freedom of her opinions and we are a constitutional democracy,” he said.

Others also voiced support for Roy, including the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, an umbrella group of farmer unions, which condemned the decision. A few protests by civil rights groups, activists, and students in Delhi and Bengaluru have also taken place.

Last week the lieutenant governor of Delhi, Vinai Kumar Saxena, gave the go-ahead to the police to prosecute Roy, along with the academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain, under the anti-terrorism law, known as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), for remarks they made at a seminar in 2010.

Roy is reported to have said the disputed region of Kashmir had never been “an integral part of India”.

Ever since Roy’s literary success in 1997, when she won the Booker prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things, she has been a sharp critic not only of Narendra Modi’s government but of previous governments too. She has attracted praise and censure in equal measure for her critiques of capitalism, the treatment of minorities, and globalisation, as well as her support for human rights causes.

However, the decision to prosecute her under the law, which makes bail difficult and results in people spending long years in prison awaiting trial, has shocked some Indians.

“Are we a democratic country or not?” asked Mukta Manohar, the general secretary of the Pune municipality Safai union, one of the signatories. “We signed the letter because we have to uphold our constitutional right to disagree with the government. We can’t let the government take revenge against critics like Roy out of some personal whim.”

Arnab Goswami, an unapologetically pro-Modi TV anchor, expressed his “delight” at the lieutenant governor’s decision.

“I’m very happy that Arundhati Roy, that terrorist supporter, that Maoist sympathiser, what I call a Gucci separatist, who made speaking against India a career option when her books failed, is finally going to be prosecuted,” said Goswami.

What remains unclear is why the decision to prosecute has been taken at this particular moment, when the complaint against her, filed by someone who attended the seminar, has been pending with the police for 14 years without being pursued.

Lawyers say they are puzzled as to why such a draconian law has been invoked. The supreme court lawyer Sanjay Hegde thinks that if Roy had been prosecuted under other, less harsh laws such as those dealing with provoking disharmony or inciting enmity among certain groups, the government would have run foul of the statute of limitations. No such limitation applies to the UAPA.

Nonetheless, Hegde thinks the case will be challenged in the courts at a very early stage for two reasons.

“The police will have to explain the 14-year delay and also explain why she should be charged when her words have not resulted in any violence or criminal acts in all this time,” he said.

The human rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves agreed that the case, if the government goes ahead, could collapse at the first hurdle. “It’s a crazy decision and they won’t be able to prove that Roy was linked to any violence or any efforts to overthrow the state. The prosecution is unlikely to succeed,” he said.

Nor is it clear whether the decision to sanction action against her is based on evidence that has emerged from a police investigation or whether it is expected to emerge from a police investigation that is still to take place.

Some liberals had hoped Modi’s reduced majority in the recent general election and his dependence on two regional parties could herald a more tolerant approach to dissent.

But Hegde said the opposite seemed to be happening and that Roy had been chosen as a target for being a “low-hanging fruit” in that she is seen as representing a broad swathe of intellectuals and activists ranged against the government.

Even if the prosecution failed, he said, it would send a loud message to Modi’s critics that keeping quiet was their best option because one day the state may come looking for them under the UAPA.

“The message is, don’t think that given our reduced mandate, we are going to be any nicer. If anything, we may be even harsher than before,” said Hegde.