It’s darn quiet on the literary front at the moment, with the only real news being that Seamus Heaney (pictured) has at long last won the £10,000 TS Eliot prize, for his collection District and Circle.

We’ve been casting about on the net for some interesting reading, so make yourself a cuppa and try these links for an international update:

Martin Amis, with gritted teeth, reported in The Complete Review:

Even poor Martin Amis has been reduced to such humiliations as participating in The Independent's Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions, writing in to answer readers' questions. At least he treats the questions with the respect they deserve - for example:

What’s the worst thing that's ever happened to you?

One day I returned home from a book tour in the US, and I noticed that the leading edge of the toilet roll in the bathroom wasn't folded into an inviting V - as it was in all those American hotels.

Stormin' Norman Mailer on a downer, interviewed on ew.com:

… there's something going on now that I don't like in American culture: There's very little interest in novels anymore. So my novel will come out, and it'll receive some good reviews and some bad reviews - it's going to receive a great many bad reviews, I can tell, but that's another topic.

Good news for libraries reported in The Guardian:

English libraries are attracting more visitors than ever before despite a fall in total expenditure on books, according to a new report … There was a small rise of about 1% in the number of visits to public libraries - continuing a trend for increasing visits. The total number of visitors has risen 7.5% in total over the past five years. The number of computer terminals in public libraries has risen by 7% in the past year as libraries continue to expand their role into different forms of educational media.

And finally, Time magazine succumbs to the lure of the list:

Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if - just for argument's sake - you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world - Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them - and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time.

On a more local note, the book events scene is beginning to pick up. Starting on February 12, the Book Council will be hosting several international writers including Marina Lewycka (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian), Conn Iggulden (The Dangerous Book for Boys) and Bill Bryson. They’ll be joined by some of our own leading lights, including Elizabeth Knox, Jack Lasenby, Bernard Beckett, Damien Wilkens and Lloyd Jones.

One of the highlights will Something From Nothing: Oliver Driver discussing creativity with photographer Ans Westra, writer Peter Wells, and pop artist Otis Frizzell on March 6 in Auckland. More info is on the Book Council website.

Right, that’s it for a few days. We’re off to Whangapoua in the Coromandel, with fingers crossed that the weather holds - and the harbour is not buzzing with pesky jetskiers.

See you next week.