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John Updike has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement award for the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

The Mystery Writers of America will honor James Lee Burke and Sue Grafton with the 2009 Grand Master Award.

The Costa Book Awards are given each year to writers from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The awards are given both for high literary merit but also for works that are enjoyable reading and whose aim is to convey the enjoyment of reading to the widest possible audience. As such they are a more populist literary prize than the Booker Prize. The nominees for the 2008 award are:

For fiction novel:
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernieres
Trauma by Patrick McGrath

For first novel:
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams (published in the U.S. as The Sister)
The Outcast by Sadie Jones
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney

Universal Pictures has reached an agreement with Robert Ludlum's estate that will give the studio exclusive rights to the Jason Bourne character, as well as first dibs on all other Ludlum novels. The next Bourne movie is scheduled for release in Summer 2010. Hopefully starring Matt Damon.

A new novel by Elie Wiesel, called A Mad Desire to Dance, will be published in February. The novel is about a Polish Jew, who looks back on his life after surviving the occupation while his siblings were killed and his parents died in an accident.

Borders recently announced that although sales are still down, they have reduced their debt and operating costs and is no longer on the market.

Borders has also announced the nominees for its 2008 Original Voices Award. The nominees are:
Fiction
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Non-Fiction
The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler by Thomas Hager
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner
The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever by Benjamin Mee

David Ebershoff's novel The Danish Girl, loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who, in 1931, became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation, will be made into a film starring Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron. Filming is set to begin in 2009.