The Man Booker Prize winner is announced tomorrow, and Ali Smith is the leader where sales are concerned, but the bookies favour George Saunders.

The prize used to champion unknowns and outsiders. But a 2014 rule change has cemented the neo-colonial cultural dominance of the US and the UK, argues Lucy Diver in The Guardian.

Meanwhile, the Bookseller crunches the numbers to show you how to win. It helps, of course, to be white, male, and privileged, but also to start your title with the.

In other prize news, Dark Chapter by Winnie M Li wins Not The Booker Prize and Amy and Rosy from The Riff Raff Podcast interview her recently.

Saleem Haddad’s Guapa has been awarded the Polari First Book Prize for its “intimate and complex” portrait of gay life in the Arab world.

It will probably surprise nobody that the British Library has seen record-breaking sales of tickets for the Harry Potter exhibition which opens on Friday and features “previously unseen material from the Bloomsbury archive and J K Rowling”.

Speaking of Harry Potter, Book Riot has a list of recommending reading for Ravenclaws.

Book Riot also has a round up of non-fiction about the wives of King Henry VIII.

And also on Book Riot, a guide to the literary delights of Cambridge.

Jennifer Egan, whose new novel Manhattan Beach came out earlier this month, spoke to Red about fame, family, and fiction.

An independent bookshop has opened in Halifax in a 240-year-old cloth trading hall, the city’s first dedicated bookstore for four years.

Robert Macfarlane, Jeanette Winterson and Matt Haig are some of the headliners announced for the biggest ever Hay Festival Winter Weekend.

The guest on this week’s Desert Island Discs was Jane Gardam, who is best known for her trilogy of novels about an ex-colonial QC nicknamed Old Filth.

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