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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