Writer | featured news

On 11 October, when the Nobel Committee announced that they had decided to award this year's Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan, the Chinese writer was in hiding in his hometown Gaomi, of Shandong province, some 600km (370 miles) from Beijing.

Writers and warehouse workers, janitors and business consultants, truck drivers and graphic designers--all are part of the new "precariat," and they have no social safety net. Almost one-third of American workers now do some kind of freelance work—and they lack almost every kind of economic security that permanent full-time workers have traditionally had.

The five writers knew a little about each other before they decided to pile into an SUV and embark upon a tour of five Southern states in seven days.

All is forgiven for Time magazine writer and CNN host Fareed Zakaria, who last week was suspended by both outlets for apparent plagiarism. CNN said Thursday that Zakaria's weekly "GPS" public affairs program returns to the air Aug. 26. Time said in a separate statement that Zakaria's column would resume with the magazine's Sept. 7 issue.

Time magazine and CNN suspended Fareed Zakaria, the writer and television host, on Friday after he apologized for plagiarizing sections of his column on gun control in the Aug. 20 issue of Time.

The body of Joe Bodalai, who co-wrote the script for the first "Wayne's World" movie, was discovered at a Los Angeles hotel on Monday.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him acclaim as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II.

How he both inadvertently created the voice of the Internet and ruined a generation of writers.

An outspoken Chinese writer and government critic has left his homeland for Germany after police repeatedly threatened him with imprisonment to prevent him from publishing any more of his controversial works overseas. Liao Yiwu arrived in Berlin two days ago at the end of a secretive journey that included transfers in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and Warsaw, Poland, the writer said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

US writer and producer Leonard Stern, who was behind hit shows including Get Smart and The Honeymooners, dies aged 87.