South Lakeland ‘artivist’ Marianne Birkby, founder of the pressure group Radiation Free Lakeland, has produced and published a Raymond Briggs-style picture book in her efforts to continue the campaign against plans to create the world’s first high level nuclear waste dump in West Cumbria.

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Catherine Hall (no relation to Sarah), who grew up in the Lake District, has won the 2011 Green Carnation Prize with her second novel, The Proof of Love.

Set during the long hot summer of 1976, it’s a deeply evocative and moving tale of a young Cambridge mathematician, Spencer Little, who arrives in a remote Lakeland village and takes on a job as a farm labourer. Read more>>

Sheffield kids love Disgusting Dave so much they’ve given him an award. Dave loves farting dogs and flesh-eating maggots.

Prolific Bowness-on-Solway writer Jim Eldridge has been down to the Steel City to pick up a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Sheffield Children’s Book Awards on Dave’s behalf. As they possibly say in Sheffield, he’s chuffin chuffed. Read more>>

Ulverston poet Neil Curry’s latest critical book, Six Eighteenth Century Poets, puts the finger on Wordsworth as one of the chief architects of a smear campaign to undermine the reputations of Thomas Gray and his contemporaries.

Concerned that the damage done might render some of his favourite poets as mute and inglorious as the occupants of Gray’s famous churchyard, he’s out to set the record straight. Read more>>

By pure and strange coincidence, another book about artist Percy Kelly has hit the shelves – more or less at the same time as Chris Wadsworth’s The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Drawing.

Dear Mary, Love Percy – a Creative Thread reveals yet more about Kelly’s intriguing life and work via the distinctive medium of his illustrated letters.

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The Pre-school Playgroups Association set in motion the whole of the playgroup movement, which celebrates its half-century this year. An enormously successful organisation, it embodied many of the qualities and attitudes that government and policy makers would like to achieve right now.

Mungrisdale Writers Group member Jill Faux was a key figure in the movement, and has contributed the final chapter of a new book about its rise and fall. Read more>>

The latest title from Dent-based small publisher Handstand Press is just out. Timmy Ted and the Chapel Island Adventure is a picture book for children created and illustrated by Ulverston dad of four, Kenny Bower.

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Last week was National Short Story Week, but this week saw the publication of Sarah Hall’s first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference.

Sarah began her writing career as a poet but made her name as a novelist. She signalled her arrival as a fine short story writer when ‘Butcher’s Perfume’ was shortlisted for last year’s BBC Short Story Award … Read more>>

After the success of Hercules and the Farmer’s Wife, her story of how her Castlegate House Gallery began and developed over the last 25 years, Cockermouth art dealer Chris Wadsworth is in print again with a new book about one of her life’s great passions, the artist Percy Kelly.

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West Cumbrian author Frederick Lightfoot’s latest novel, My Name is E, is published by Sandstone Press today (21 October).

In the last year of the Second World War three deaf girls are born in the same coastal village in the north of England. Miracle, coincidence, tragedy or omen? As children they discover each other on the shore and call one another sisters. Read more …

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists who discovered that our universe’s expansion is accelerating. Conventional thinking held that the expansion of the universe should be slowing down, with gravity acting as a brake.

‘Conventional’ is not an epithet you could use to describe Maryport writer and editor Sam Smith, whose novel The End of Science Fiction, according to proud publishers BeWrite Books, predicted the scientists’ mind-expanding breakthrough. Read more …