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 …

Can Intervention Work? is the latest book from Penrith & the Border MP Rory Stewart, co-authored with Gerald Knaus, founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative and a Carr Center Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

Successful intervention is fundamentally about knowledge: do we know enough about the country’s cultural, linguistic and political textures to effectively intervene? Most of the time, and particularly in the Middle East, according to Stewart and Knaus, the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Read more …

Two characters from children’s books – one a household name, the other a newcomer, both made in Cumbria – are about to make their debuts on the silver screen.

Postman Pat: The Movie – You Know You’re the One goes into production this month and is due in cinemas in spring 2013.

An animated 3D Pat will be voiced by Green Wing actor Stephen Mangan, who heads a cast list that also includes Jim Broadbent, Rupert Grint and David Tennant. Read more …

Artist, engineer of the imagination, pathological optimist, cultural provocateur, printmaker, lecturer, beachcomber – in the long list of labels and epithets that will always fail to describe exactly what it is that John Fox does, perhaps ‘poet’ comes closest to nailing him down.

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Cumbrian writer, journalist and broadcaster Hunter Davies needs your help.

The author of the only authorised biography of The Beatles was at the International Beatle Week Festival in Liverpool last week, talking about his latest project – gathering and editing material for The Lennon Letters, due to be published next year.

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Cumbrian author Sarah Hall is one of seventeen writers and sixteen scientists included in a new, ground-breaking anthology from Manchester-based Comma Press.

Edited by Comma’s founding editor, Ra Page, Litmus is subtitled Short Stories from Modern Science, and takes a completely fresh approach to telling stories (literally) of classic scientific discoveries. Read more …