In The Big Short, Michael Lewis' terrifying account of how the US sub-prime housing market came to implode, he describes the career of Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager who realised years before anyone else that the entire US economy was teetering on sinking sand. He did this by means of a simple expedient: reading through the...

What are authors supposed to do for water coolers? Conversations with colleagues are one of the great pleasures of working life—yet writing, by and large, is a solitary business. It would be a misanthropic author indeed who has never once regretted this.

Even though Grub Street has now expanded to include, at odd times of the...

Writers’ ability to average out their earnings over a number of years could be abolished, according to new tax system proposals.

The Office of Tax Simplification’s new review of tax reliefs listed authors’ ability to average out their profits between consecutive years as one of the “Reliefs to Abolish”....

The Romantic Novelists Association has written to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt protesting at the plan to transfer the administration of Public Lending Right funding for authors to a larger body. Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors, has also branded the PLR move as "pointless."

The body administering the...