£20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to story ‘tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour’

A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

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A new study highlights the dangers of a modern rentier capitalism that perpetuates inequality through the generations

In a recent study picked up in the French press , the academic Mélanie Plouviez cites one of her country’s best-loved novelists to make a damning point. The power of inherited and unearned wealth in the France of 2025, she argues, replicates the social injustices found in Honoré de Balzac’s 19th-century chronicles of ambition and despair. As in the 1820s, she writes, “Who now could buy a place in Paris relying only on their wage and without family help? With the resurgence of inherited wealth, a gulf between what work allows and inheritance allows has also returned.”

The problem is a sadly familiar one across Europe, and the same observation could be made of Britain, Germany or Italy. The economist Thomas Piketty has laid bare the extent to which booming stock markets and property prices have turbocharged asset wealth in western liberal democracies, at the expense of those reliant solely on a wage. Since the 1980s, regressive tax changes have empowered the wealthy to keep more of their money and pass more of it on to their sons and daughters. In advanced economies, the amount of inherited wealth has more or less doubled as a proportion of GDP, compared with the middle of the last century.

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Queen Camilla opens house, refurbished after 18-month fundraising campaign, where you can stay ‘in the same room the Brontës slept in’

The refurbished house in Bradford where the Brontë sisters were born is now welcoming visitors, having been opened on Thursday by the queen.

Nestled in a narrow street in the village of Thornton, the home where the literary dynasty spent the early years of their lives was officially opened by Queen Camilla during her visit to Bradford, this year’s City of Culture, with King Charles.

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Benjamin Appl/James Baillieu
(Alpha)
The great baritone’s final student emulates his late mentor’s attention to verbal and musical detail in a 32-song centenary homage featuring plenty of Schubert

No lieder singer of the second half of the last century has cast a longer shadow on subsequent generations than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . Even singers who never studied with the great baritone acknowledge his influence, but for Benjamin Appl the link was much more direct: after attending a masterclass that Fischer-Dieskau gave in Austria in 2009, Appl became Fischer-Dieskau’s final pupil , working with him up to his death three years later.

The centenary tribute that Appl has put together to his teacher with pianist James Baillieu is thoughtful and handsomely produced. The disc of 32 songs is well chosen to reflect every stage in Fischer-Dieskau’s life, from his childhood, through his years as a soldier and prisoner of war during the second world war, the steady upward curve of his career through the 1950s and 60s, to the eminence of his later years. . Packaged within a lavishly illustrated hardback book, it also includes some of the works that were composed specially for him. Schubert is predictably well represented in the sequence, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf unexpectedly rather less so, and Richard Strauss not all, though there are songs by Eisler and Bruno Walter, and by Fischer-Dieskau’s father Albert and brother Klaus. Without ever aping his famous mentor, Appl’s performances have the same attention to detail, both verbal and musical, though his tone sometimes takes on a hard, rather acid edge; it’s a worthy, heartfelt tribute and Fischer-Dieskau’s legions of fans won’t hesitate.

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In its 25th year, the National Simultaneous Storytime event is inviting children from Australia and beyond to read a gentle story of migration, belonging and family – starring an inquisitive cat and a truck driver

“They lose the cat, they find the cat again, they fall in love and then they get a baby.” This is how Clementine, four-and-a-half, summarises The Truck Cat, a picture book by children’s author Deborah Frenkel and illustrator Danny Snell.

On Wednesday 21 May at noon, more than one million children across Australia will read The Truck Cat in over 9,000 locations, including schools, libraries, homes and hospitals. It’s the 25th instalment of the annual National Simultaneous Storytime, run by the Australian Library and Information Association (Alia). Last year’s event saw 2.3 million people take part; this year, participants are registered from countries as far away as Albania, Lithuania and Italy.

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As Spike Lee’s neo-noir crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest debuts at Cannes film festival, we index the most ravishing Hollywood redos of all time

Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) obsesses over the fate of his missing girlfriend in George Sluizer’s American remake of his own 1988 Franco-Dutch psychochiller. Is it as devastating as the original? Absolutely not! But Jeff Bridges has never been creepier, and at least the dumb Hollywood ending won’t give you nightmares.

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Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
What happens when artists paint artists? From Lucian Freud and Celia Paul to Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson, this cracking show provides absorbing insights

Standing in front of Frank Auerbach’s quietly harrowing charcoal portrait of Leon Kossoff and Kossoff’s own heavily textured, dour portrait of Auerbach, I felt as if I was caught between the gazes of the two artists. Caught in the balance of their stares, seeing the way each sees the other, I was both implicated and invisible.

Moments like these are the most intimate and affecting in Pallant House’s new exhibition of portraits of artists by artists. When a portrait of one artist by another is hung beside their portrait of the other, we find ourselves caught between them. There are many pairs of lovers featured, including Matthew Smith and his mistress Vera Cunningham or Lucian Freud and Celia Paul, as well as works by friends such as Auerbach and Kossoff or Nina Hamnett and Roger Fry. In some cases, such as the two paintings by Smith and Cunningham, it’s easy to see how the two artists influenced each other as they found a shared visual language of heavy, impressionistic brushstrokes and a dark, jewel-like palette. In others, the aesthetic distinctness is what draws you in.

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Exclusive: London theatre urges Home Office to reconsider as Ibrahima Balde unable to watch adaptation of award-winning book

The author of an award-winning memoir about his life as a refugee has been refused a UK visa to attend a premiere of its adaptation for the London stage by one of Britain’s most celebrated playwrights.

Ibrahima Balde, who lives in Spain, was told the UK government was not satisfied he would return home after the performance of Little Brother which begins its run at Jermyn Street Theatre next week.

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The prolific performer played varied roles – from arms dealer to baseball star – and made the rare switch from Bond villain to Bond good guy

Tough-guy actor Joe Don Baker, a prolific performer in movies as varied as GoldenEye, Cape Fear and Mud, as well as the BBC TV series Edge of Darkness, has died aged 89 .

Born in 1936, Baker grew up in small town Texas, and studied business administration at North Texas State College. After a period in the army, Baker moved to New York and joined the Actors’ Studio in the early 1960s, where he was a contemporary of Rip Torn. Baker made his Broadway debut in 1963 with the Actors’ Studio company, appearing in Marathon ’33, about the dance marathons of the Great Depression, and made his film debut in an uncredited role in 1967 in Cool Hand Luke. He also appeared in numerous TV series, including the pilot episode of a western show called Lancer in 1968, the making of which was fictionalised by Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Baker’s role.

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