Lorien Kite

When Michael Gove declared in June that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, the then justice secretary not only secured himself a solitary entry in the Oxford Essential Quotations; he also issued a challenge to the world of books. For what are writers if not experts? It is natural, then, as we look back on the year of Brexit and Trump, to ask what they were able to tell us about the events unfolding before our eyes. The gift of prophecy comes more easily in some fields than in…

The FT’s books editor reflects on the literary year

Writer celebrated for historical novels is a surprise winner of prestigious award

Look for a topical expression in the Oxford English Dictionary and you may find it is older than you think. “Phone-hacking”, for example, was first used in the early 1980s. Americans have been worrying about “fiscal cliffs” of one kind or another for more than 50 years. And the desire for an “Arab spring” goes back to at least 1975 – or longer in the case of cyclists, for whom the term was coined in the late 19th century to denote a component in the suspension of saddles.

The headlines all but wrote themselves when Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries at London’s Guildhall this week. Catton, who has just turned 28, is the youngest author to take the £50,000 award and the first New Zealander since Keri Hulme in 1985. Her novel, at 832 pages, is also by a considerable margin the longest winner in Booker history. Yet for all the firsts, and against a shortlist widely seen as the strongest in years, it somehow didn’t feel like a surprise.…

Alice Munro, the Canadian writer known for her explorations of big themes in the small-town settings of southwestern Ontario, has been announced as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its award citation, the Swedish Academy described the 82-year-old Ms Munro as the “master of the contemporary short story”. Ms Munro, the author of 14 short story collections that have earned her comparisons with Chekhov, is only the 13th woman to take the prize and the fourth this century. She i…

Tom Clancy, the American thriller writer, died in a hospital in Baltimore on Tuesday after a short illness. He was 66. Clancy became one of the world’s best-selling and wealthiest authors with his novels pitting the US military and intelligence services against Soviets and other enemies, from IRA terrorists to Colombian drug lords. He is best known for his hero Jack Ryan, whose exploits have been the subject of four film adaptations starring Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. Clancy’…

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Valerie Eliot, literary executor, 1926-2012