Move over Paddington Bear. After almost 30 years off screen, the Wombles – the furry, litter-picking creatures who live beneath Wimbledon Common – are set for a comeback.

The characters, whose motto is “Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish”, are being revived after the consolidation of the brand’s intellectual property rights under The Blair Partnership, which will oversee its global development.

The deal opens the door to new television, film, audio, publishing, theatre, live events, digital media and gaming projects for the first time since 1999, with plans aimed at nostalgic adults and a new generation of children.

It comes at a time when environmental themes that once seemed quirky have become mainstream concerns, giving fresh relevance to the Wombles’s longstanding message about caring for the planet.

Created by author Elisabeth Beresford in the late 1960s, the Wombles became a national phenomenon after the BBC adapted the books into a stop-motion television show that ran from 1973 to 1975.

Two series of The Wombles were aired on BBC One accompanied by Mike Batt’s music, which included the show’s theme tune with the lyrics “Underground overground, Wombling free”. The characters were voiced by actor Bernard Cribbins, while the puppets were created by Ivor Wood.

Although the original BBC series ended in 1975, the franchise proved resilient. A revival on ITV in the 1990s – together with a feature film, stage productions and a thriving merchandise business – helped secure the Wombles’s place in British popular culture.

The revival will begin this summer with the launch of a Wombles YouTube channel featuring original episodes alongside new live-action content. Young hosts and influencers will front programmes designed to promote creativity and environmental awareness through activities including arts and crafts, cooking and gardening.

Other projects in development include a digital interactive game, audio productions featuring celebrity casts and an expanded programme of charitable and educational initiatives.

Neil Blair, founding partner and agent at The Blair Partnership, said: “The Wombles is an iconic British brand with strong cultural appeal, distinctive characters with core values that translate and resonate globally.

“It is a rich content opportunity, and with rights now aligned plus a clear development pipeline in place, the property is ideally positioned for expansion across multiple platforms and categories. We see significant potential to build The Wombles into a multi-platform international franchise for a new generation of audiences.”

The renewed push will also place greater emphasis on The Wombles Community Charity, which organises litter-picking, recycling and educational projects across the UK through more than 250 community groups and 50,000 registered volunteers.

Its campaign for 2026, “Be More Womble”, will encourage people to support their communities. The charity has also partnered with NHS hospitals in Sussex to recycle non-infectious clinical waste into training equipment, a scheme that is due to be expanded to other hospitals.

The idea for The Wombles originated during a Boxing Day walk on Wimbledon Common, when Beresford’s daughter repeatedly mispronounced the location as “Wombledon Common”. The author went on to create a cast of characters inspired by members of her family.

Great Uncle Bulgaria was modelled on her father-in-law, Tobermory on her inventor brother, Orinoco on her son, and Madame Cholet on her mother.

Although the stories centred on the inhabitants of a burrow beneath Wimbledon Common, Beresford imagined Wombles living all over the world. In her first book, she described them as looking “a bit like teddy bears” but with “real claws”.

Over the following decade, Beresford wrote more Wombles books that were translated into more than 40 languages. She also penned a stage adaptation, one version of which ran in the West End.

Epistolary novels were once all the rage, from the epic Clarissa to the lurid fun of Dracula. They don’t come along very often now, perhaps because they can be tricky to do well: all those gaps and omissions, the need for a flawless command of tone and voice, the problem of creating movement within an unusually hermetic form. But every now and then a book appears that’s a breakout success. The 2000s saw two epistolary smash hits in We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (boy, are those different reading experiences), while in the 2010s there was Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Now we have Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent. It’s been one of those word-of-mouth sensations that puts a spring back into publishers’ steps, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, now shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. It’s easy to see why, given that it’s such an immensely enjoyable read.

Three times a week, 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp sits down at her desk in her Maryland home to write her letters. Her correspondence has been, as she puts it, “the mainstay of my life”. Recipients include her best friend Rosalie, her brother Felix, the unhappy young son of a former colleague, and an unnamed correspondent to whom Sybil writes much more emotionally raw letters, which remain unsent and fulfil a similar function to the diary sections often included in older epistolary novels.

Sybil’s voice is direct, irascible, always somewhat at odds with the world around her: “Dear Rosalie,” begins one letter briskly, “I haven’t heard from you. Waiting for your response to my last, but cannot wait for ever.” She is a pleasingly contradictory character: prickly and obstinate, but equally capable of generosity and wisdom.

Crucially, the novel never feels static, despite its form. Covering a span of several years, the narrative packs in the emergence of two separate suitors for Sybil, glimpses of her formidable legal career, a DNA testing kit, and the painful backstory of the death of her son, Gilbert, as a child. Another source of tension is the fact that Sybil is losing her sight, and the correspondence that has formed her “manner of living” will soon be brought to an end.

Replies are included from time to time, which provides variety and texture. Felix is a particular joy, matching Sybil in directness but with added offhand charm (“You better not say those kinds of things about her marriage to your daughter with things already strained,” he counsels Sybil – “ your own marriage was a filthy sewer”).

Evans also has Sybil write to real-life figures, including Ann Patchett, George Lucas and Joan Didion. A couple of fictionalised replies from Didion are included, as well as her implicit responses embedded within Sybil’s own letters, and I felt some discomfort with this brief act of ventriloquism, given the subject is the loss of a child. Perhaps Evans’s decision is justified by the fact that the real Didion wrote in some depth about her daughter’s death, but, still, those words were Didion’s own.

But, as a character study, the book is skilful and moving. Evans is especially sharp on the role correspondence has played in Sybil’s life. Late on, Sybil reflects: “When I was younger, by writing letters I found a framework that made living easier, and that has never changed. However, I do wonder if by conducting the most intimate relationships of my life in correspondence, I have kept, since I was a child, a distance between myself and others.” The reader feels how accurately this applies to Sybil, and we can see the distance created within the syntax itself. It’s satisfying to find form, character and style interwoven in this way.

The book is also, of course, a paean to the art of correspondence. By the time I finished it, I found myself composing letters in my head to all my friends and acquaintances, God help them. Long live the epistolary renaissance.

Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are to appear in the new Hunger Games movie, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which is in production.

The Hollywood Reporter said it confirmed the pair’s return to the Hunger Games series, in what is the sixth film in the franchise. Both will play the same characters as in the original set of films – Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen and Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark – with the Hollywood Reporter suggesting they will “likely appear in a flash-forward”. At the close of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (released in 2015), Everdeen and Mellark are married with children.

Sunrise on the Reaping is adapted from the 2025 novel by Suzanne Collins, and will be the second prequel film in the series after The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, released in 2023, which was also based on a novel by Collins. Like all but one of the Hunger Games films so far, it is directed by Francis Lawrence.

The events of Sunrise on the Reaping take place 24 years before The Hunger Games (and 40 years after The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes); they centre on Haymitch Abernathy, a tribute for the 50th Hunger Games, who is later to become Everdeen’s mentor (as played by Woody Harrelson in the original films). The film also stars Jesse Plemons as Plutarch Heavensbee (previously played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Ralph Fiennes as a younger version of President Snow (originally played by Donald Sutherland).

Lawrence is now appearing in Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay, for which she has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best female actor. Hutcherson is in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, which opened at No 1 at the North American box office on 5 December.

Filming on Sunrise on the Reaping began in summer 2025 and producer Nina Jacobson said on social media that it had “wrapped” in November. It is due for release in November 2026.

BookCon will return in 2026

Jun 18 2025

Five years after “retiring” BookCon and BookExpo, ReedPop has announced—to the surprise of many in the book business—that it plans to revive BookCon. The new iteration of the consumer-facing show is slated for April 18-19, 2026, returning to its former home in New York City’s Javits Center.

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He’s got knobbly knees, turned-out toes, a poisonous wart at the end of his nose … and he’s back, for the first time in more than 20 years: Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler have announced they are working on a new Gruffalo book.

Due out in September 2026, the as-yet-untitled picture book will return to the world of the bestselling stories The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child, which were published in 1999 and 2004 respectively. The books are among the most popular children’s titles in the world, with The Gruffalo having sold 3.2m copies to date, and The Gruffalo’s Child 2.1m copies.

The new story “sees the return of much-loved characters in a fresh and exciting adventure that has all the hallmarks of a Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler classic,” according to the book’s publisher Macmillan.

“It’s always a challenge to write a sequel,” Donaldson said. “I actually had the basic idea for the story a long time ago, but couldn’t think how to develop it.”

It was only when the charity National Literacy Trust (NLT) used the first two books as part of one of its campaigns last year that the writer was “spurred on to get my idea out of the cupboard and see once and for all if I could turn it into a really satisfying story,” she said. “To my surprise, I managed to do just that! I was of course delighted when Axel came on board, and am even more so now that I’ve seen the brilliant sketches he’s already done for the new book.”

Scheffler said: “Never say never – a lesson learned for me who, whenever asked, denied the possibility of another visit to the deep dark wood. Till one day out of the blue there came a wonderfully clever and inspired new text by Julia. How does she do this? Could I decline? Of course not!”

The German illustrator and British writer’s first collaboration was a picture book about an unhappy elderly lady who brings a group of farmyard animals into her small home, A Squash and a Squeeze, published in 1993. Since then, Scheffler and Donaldson have published more than 30 books together, the most famous being the Gruffalo titles.

The original Gruffalo story is written in rhyming couplets and follows a mouse walking through a wood where he comes across a number of predators before finally meeting the large and terrifying Gruffalo. It was inspired by a Chinese folk tale called The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger, about a child who cons a jungle tiger into submission.

“I intended the book to be about a tiger, but I just couldn’t get anything to rhyme with ‘tiger’,” Donaldson told the Observer in 2004. “But then I came up with ‘Silly old fox, doesn’t he know / there’s no such thing as a blank-blank-oh.’ Then I began with ‘Grrrr’, which I hoped would sound quite scary. Then all I needed was a word of three syllables, ending in ‘oh’. Somehow, ‘Gruffalo’ came to mind.”

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The original Gruffalo book is available in 113 languages and dialects and has been adapted into plays and an Academy Award-nominated animated film. It has also inspired a range of merchandise, a commemorative coin, a theme park ride in Chessington World of Adventures and and a series of woodland trails.

Macmillan will be partnering with NLT and other charitable organisations across the globe for the publication of the new book, with plans to drive an international children’s reading and storytelling campaign. This follows NLT’s report at the end of last year which showed that only 1 in 3 children enjoy reading in their spare time, the lowest level since 2005.

Jonathan Douglas, NLT’s chief executive, said: “Reading and sharing stories is critical for shaping a child’s early speech and language development and we can’t think of a better way to support families in igniting their children’s love of stories and reading than with the magic and influence of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo.”

There is, it seems, an unwritten law in the world of artificial intelligence, which I will attempt to distil here: “Any discussion of AI must include an early and robust reference to the Terminator”. Though the 1984 James Cameron film and its 1991 sequel are quite good, here are two equally made-up but probably mostly true facts: no one under the age of 30 has seen either film and, in any case, neither film has anything particularly insightful to say about AI. But here we are, and the relentless analyses of the moment we are in – where we apparently stand on precipices of revolutions, ushering in utopia or the apocalypse – tend to be written by men who have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator failing to assassinate Sarah Connor many times over. If you can also allude to biblical creation, then you’re winning at AI bingo.

AI expert Neil Lawrence springs both traps on page one of his new book, The Atomic Human, and fulfilling the promise of the Terminator’s most quoted line (“I’ll be back”), the film makes a further 15 appearances. Lawrence doesn’t reference the more recent Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 AI film (that I, full disclosure, had a minor role in creating) which explicitly mocks techbro Silicon Valley arrogance: a Mark Zuckerberg/Elon Musk-like CEO hubristically misquotes a comment made about the creation myth of his own artificially intelligent robot: “If I’ve invented a machine with consciousness, I’m not a man, I’m a God.”

I wonder if we are in a unique moment in history when the discourse is shaped so significantly by the fiction that the men who are in charge of these domains consumed as nerdy youths. Last month it was revealed that Sam Altman, the controversial figure behind OpenAI had asked the actor Scarlett Johansson to voice the latest incarnation of their ChatGPT interface, emulating her role as the AI personal assistant in the 2013 film Her. Johansson declined, but Altman allegedly used a soundalike actor or possibly an artificial Johansson voice anyway. In May, apparently too arrogant (or rich) to bother hiding his deed, Altman tweeted the single word, “her”. Hubris 1: Ethics nil.

We understand big ideas through storytelling. Much has been made of humans as storytelling machines, and Lawrence embraces this mode of science communication with gusto. He indulges us with the Bletchley Park saga, Alan Turing’s brilliance and details of the strategies and technologies of the second world war, in enjoyably exploring ideas of intelligence and how computers can or don’t emulate human cognition. In a chapter called Enlightenment, we veer from Great Man classic tales of Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill and Stephen Hawking, down a cul-de-sac visiting William Blake and Michelangelo, then to Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell, and all the way to Elon Musk, via many more.

It says on the press release for The Atomic Human that “the voices of women in AI get overshadowed”. I scanned the index and found that 15 women are named in this 448-page book (16 if you count the goddess Hera), as well as the mention of two groups of anonymous women (Royal Navy Wrens, and the women of Bletchley Park). Winnie-the-Pooh, a fictional bear who as far as I am aware, did not make any pronouncements on intelligence research, or the AI revolution, is mentioned 17 times. I highlight this not to signal my no-doubt jarring political correctness, nor to deny the possibility that, for reasons unexplored in this book, women have played a less significant direct role in the history of AI and big Silicon Valley tech. But if the voices of women are overshadowed in a book by a movie robot or a whimsical bear, then by god we need new stories.

Countless books and films cover the history of Bletchley, of codebreaking, of life in Facebook or Microsoft, about George Mallory and Edmund Hillary, about JFK and the Apollo moon landings. Page after page of the Atomic Human are war stories and rocket stories, jumping about in time and space, and muddling the premise. Maybe I am not manly enough to be excited by this paean to the well-documented but tangential achievements of men. Even if the intended narrative here is to synthesise a thesis about how these well-told tales contribute to our understanding of intelligence, I couldn’t quite pick out the relevance of so many of these boys’ own adventures to the expectation embedded in the subtitle: “Understanding ourselves in the age of AI”.

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Lawrence is, however, refreshingly dismissive of the tiring amount of posturing and bullshit in the world of AI. I may be in a minority in thinking that the trademark “big concepts” are so often pseudo-philosophical grandstanding by men who like the sport and status but maybe should’ve read a bit more philosophy, and at least had a glance at some history: the singularity – the point when technology is irreversibly beyond our control; transhumanism – a waftily defined state where we are human but vastly enhanced via some unspecified tech; Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence – a hypothetical technology whose mind far exceeds that of our own crude meat-brains. I’ve never quite resolved whether these future demons are the hooks to get people interested in the real issues, or simply distractions, the magician’s flourish. Either way, I’ve always found them rather tiresome. Lawrence pleasingly labels them as “hooey”, because in all their grandeur, they seem to be terabytes away from the real world of AI that we already live in.

Instead, Lawrence offers novel insight into what intelligence is, how it evolved, and how it is distributed in different living and non-living systems. Comparisons to psychological processing, and the intricacies of the intelligent learning behaviour of our own nervous systems provide insight into the neural processes that do, might or don’t underlie complex artificial administration – for example, in the process of buying something off Amazon, where Lawrence worked for several years – and how much of what is described as AI is merely computation and statistics. This is a salient point that should be better known, that much of the so-called AI in action today is likely to be an Excel spreadsheet doing some numerical powerlifting. But these are points lost in muddled tales whose relevance is often hard to detect.

I would prefer this book half the length and stripped of “great men” of history, to showcase the things we don’t know about what really happens inside the private offices and labs of Amazon or Facebook, and to puncture the movie-baddie hubris. It has an admirable central humanist message: that we are irreplaceable despite the scary waffle of popular discourse. Overall, The Atomic Human is a sensible book, which is higher praise than it sounds, because it tries and to some extent succeeds in rising above the very shallow oceans of public debates about AI that are often shocking but ultimately dull. I just wish he hadn’t started with a tired Uzi-toting cyborg from the 1980s.

In 2008, when Nam Le was 29, his debut garnered international attention. The Boat, a collection of stories unusual in its scope and global eye, brought prizes, headlines and lavish praise – and contractual commitments for a novel. Sixteen years later, Le has released his second book. Not the novel (it’s “getting there”, he says), but a brief, hardcover volume titled 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem: a collection of poems, or perhaps one book-length one.

While working on the novel, Melbourne-based Le, who did a stint as a corporate lawyer in an earlier life, had set himself strict limitations – no other projects, no distractions. But in the months after the birth of his first child (he has two), this intense focus was difficult to sustain. He turned back to poems, where he’d started. “I sort of let myself off the hook,” he says. “To be honest, I think it saved my connection with writing.”

36 Ways hums with the furious desire for, above all else, a private, uncategorised soul; the space to make art as “a complicated writer with full selfhood and scope” – and not as “an emissary”. The question always recurring for Le is “what it means to write as a writer that will always be described as a Vietnamese writer, or a hyphenated-Vietnamese writer – whatever you want to call that”. He is pushing, now as then, against “the onuses of representation, of explanation, of embassy … [the] limited stock of tropes and stories assumed and expected of such writers … and then the whole industry wrapped around that”.

The paradigm that’s emerged around “authenticity” is problematic, Le says. “You’re [then] already trading in the vocabulary and the ethos of branding because something that is ‘authentic’ can then exclude the other things that are ‘not authentic’” he explains. “I think that that is such a trap, especially for writers of colour.”

“Just write about Vietnam,” one character tells the narrator of The Boat’s first story. In 36 Ways, Le does. But as he catalogues the many modes of his identity, his cultural and family legacies, and of the poetic form itself, he takes a scalpel to certainty on any of them. The subject makes him animated. “[For those] accustomed to and expected to write about certain things because of their visa status, or how they look, there’s not a lot of infrastructure to be read in other ways. So to write from a place of anger, or scorn, or self-doubt – or contempt, even, or ugliness – is confusing, I think, to a lot of readers. And to the infrastructure.”

36 Ways revels in this confusion. Le prods at the feelings “typically disallowed certain writers” (“You won’t let me not – / Lick the leash or bite it.”), the “unimpeachability” assigned to valorised versions of marginalised experience (“unbelievably / composed, above all, composed”), and the impossibility of ever fully defining one’s interiority (“What’s Vietnamese in me / Could fit in a poem.”). And through it all runs a thread of quicksilver – a dark, cutting humour and sense of play.

“What I would hope readers would get from the ludicrous rhyme of ‘Asia rhymes with erasure’ as a subtitle for a poem,” he says, wryly, “is that there is a tongue firmly in cheek in these moments.”

“I wanted to be able to say: ‘Look at this, this is ridiculous! Look in the mirror!’ to both writer and reader and myself. And at the same time sort of recalibrate, retune that way of writing, that way of reading: to hopefully see it again, anew.”

When we meet, Le’s searing vignettes of deep familial love and hurt have been on my mind for days – “the flailing net ropes of filial piety”, as one poem has it; the father and son in that story from The Boat, “locked in all the intricate ways of guilt”. In both books he stretches the testing of an ethic: what is yours, or anyone’s, to write? I ask Le where he’s landed on this and he laughs, cynical of “any sort of resolution about ‘X has the right to write about Y because of Z’.”

“If I wanted a rule that would apply to a body of people in an effective way, I would go into advertising,” he says. “When it comes to family, writers legitimately land on different thresholds: different apprehensions, and senses of risk and worth – so there’s no right answer. But I think that if the question hasn’t been seriously dealt with, then the work will not be serious.”

Serious art, for him, can be “read as a process rather than resolution” (on his list: Terrance Hayes, Monica Youn, Cathy Park Hong, Kaveh Akbar, Solmaz Sharif, Diana Khoi Nguyen). 36 Ways is drenched in allusions – Ho Chi Minh to TS Eliot; Emily Dickinson to Li Po – a book of clues Le hopes allows for refractions and reframing, that resists conclusion. His dream is that the work can sustain a “cold read” as easily as “an academic assault”. And, critically, “without condescension”.

“If you’re a serious chef, you wanna cook stuff that anyone can walk in off the street and be blown away by, and not feel ashamed for enjoying,” he says. “Then you also want to create food that speaks to the tradition in which you’re making [it] – that honours … the other cooks, and hands and minds and mouths, that brought you to this place.”

Le’s writing is intensely physically grounded. The Boat is full of bodies – yearning, grieving, ageing, giving up – but the sensuality of 36 Ways feels fiercer, more personal: “My heart, for me / To heave – and how! – / Into my own damn mouth.” He considers this. “It’s really important to me that the work live in the breath and the body,” he says. Two, electric, “reclamatory” poems seek “to re-mascularise Asian men’s bodies, and to desexualise, to some degree, Asian women’s bodies” (“essentialised into nothing”, reads a line elsewhere.) “It’s terrible and tragic to even have to say this, but the fact that basic scope of humanness – namely, bodily awareness, and allowance of other bodies – is so vexed still tells you how far there is to go,” he says.

There’s so much to talk about: Le’s screenwriting; his foray into film (as DA on Goran Stolevski’s Of An Age – something, he says wistfully, he wants to do more of); the use of fear in his work (“as long as I’m kind of terrifying myself a little bit with what I’m doing, then I feel like I’m on the right track”); and a certain cultural tendency he keeps noticing, a smoothing over. Which, if it’s not apparent by now, he is committed to destabilising. “Complexity is the weather of our lives,” he says. “That not-knowing – that having doubt, and changing your mind, and being full of contradictions and contrariness and antinomies – is just normal. It’s being human.”

Cambridge University Library will soon be asked to return Scotland’s oldest surviving manuscript.

SNP councillor Glen Reid plans to write to the university in the new year to “begin a dialogue” about getting the Book of Deer – which features the oldest surviving example of written Scots Gaelic – permanently returned to Scotland.

The 10th-century book contains the gospels in Latin, with Gaelic annotations in the margins added in the 12th century. The annotations related to the monastery of Deer in Aberdeenshire, giving the book its name. In November, the exact location of the monastery was discovered during an archaeological dig.

Reid said that the book, which was used by monks, is “hugely significant to the Gaelic-speaking community” because it “proved that Gaelic was the common language” in Aberdeenshire. “There is a misconception that Gaelic was only spoken in the Highlands and Western Isles.”

Although it is not known when the text was taken from Scotland, it is believed that the book was stolen during the wars of Scottish independence, according to Scottish newspaper the National. It has been in the Cambridge University Library since 1715, except for a brief stint last year, when it was loaned to Aberdeen Art Gallery over the summer. It is only viewable by appointment.

“It’s the oldest surviving manuscript from Scotland and yet very little is known about it in the very area where it was written,” said Reid. There is little local knowledge because the book “sits 500 miles away, locked up and not on display. It returned on loan last year, drawing huge crowds, and we need to build on this and right this historical wrong,” he added.

Reid has twice submitted resolutions to the SNP conference asking that the Scottish government writes to the University of Cambridge to begin negotiations to transfer the manuscript back to Scotland, but they did not make the final agenda.

Reid is planning to re-submit the resolution to next year’s conference. “I will also raise this with our local MP and neighbouring authority to see if they can exert any influence,” he added.

“Last year, Cambridge University agreed to return 116 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria which were taken by British armed forces during the sacking of Benin City in 1897,” said Reid. “The Charity Commission concluded the university was ‘under a moral obligation’ to return the artefacts, and I am hopeful that a similar conclusion could be drawn about the Book of Deer.”

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Reid said that he feels a “duty” to facilitate the book’s return. “There is a cultural reason, an educational reason, an economic reason and, most importantly, a moral reason”, he added.

Cambridge University Libraries did not respond to a request for comment.