With a story as dramatic and tragic as the Gothic novels she wrote, Charlotte Brontë’s life was not only fascinating, it was inspiring. The main force driving her family, Charlotte encouraged her sisters as poets and novelists, stepped in to support the family after her brother’s death, travelled Europe, and using her own experiences, crafted trailblazing female characters. In this extract from Charlotte Brontë: A Life, you can catch a glimpse of the unique life that inspired her stories.
Long have authors had their stories reimagined by the magic of lighting, actors and mise en scène. From To Kill a Mockingbird to the recently released Suffragette, film adaptations have always made for gripping films, and here, we look at the latest books to come to the big screen.
Read an extract from Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story, an inspiration for the film Suffragette.
In this month’s blog, Lucy Mangan muses on her tumultuous relationship with rhyming verse, from her father’s lyrical outbursts to her teenage poetic epiphany.
In The Face of Britain, art historian and journalist Simon Schama explores the history of British portraiture, and unveils the secrets of some of the nation’s best loved works of art. In this extract, Schama tells the story of Christina Broom (nee Livingston) – Britain’s first female press photographer – and her photography of the Suffragette Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Read an extract from Shirley Jackson’s dark masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is Waterstones’ Rediscovered Classic for October.
In a career spanning almost forty years, Transworld Publishing Director Sally Gaminara has worked with authors including Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Nick Robinson. Exclusively for Think Smarter, Sally reflects on the editing process.
An accomplished novelist and short story writer, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick, A. L. Kennedy understands the perils of relying on real life to draw your fictional characters. In this extract from On Writing, Kennedy describes the responsibility of invading a reader’s space, and how not to fill your fiction with the ghosts of your past.
As part of the new Penguin By Hand series, the cover of Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love has been recreated in cross stitch by Emma Ruth Hughes. Read more on her creative process in this exclusive interview.
Penguin Blog 
Nobel Lecture: On the Battle Lost
Praised for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”, Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, and delivered her Nobel lecture on Monday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. You can read the lecture in full here.