Bob Woodward, one half of the Washington Post Watergate team, has since maintained a significant profile, though some believe his recent books come close to an apologia for George W Bush. His partner, Carl Bernstein, has been much quieter but, come June, the fruit of his labours will be in bookshops. A Woman in Charge (from Hutchinson in the UK) is his biography of former First Lady turned presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton (above). The book aims to be neither benediction nor hatchet job, and Bernstein has talked to some 200 people to reach "conclusions that stand in opposition" to what Hillary Clinton has said and written of her life.

*The book trade has always been international, editors from one nation making common cause with their counterparts. So it was heartening to see, at the London Book Fair, nine contenders - from countries including Argentina and Slovenia, Syria and South Africa - compete for the British Council's International Young Publisher of the Year award. The jury was chaired by that most international of publishers, Christopher MacLehose. And the winner was S Anand, co-founder and editor of Navayana Publishing, one of the few Indian imprints to deal with issues of caste and identity.

*Next week sees the award of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the UK's leading general honour for fiction in translation, but several language-specific prizes also do a crucial readership-expanding job. The Rossica Prize, for translations from Russian, has just released its second shortlist. Russian literature of all genres and eras is eligible, so Anthony Briggs's acclaimed new version of Tolstoy's War and Peace will go head-to-head with (among others) Robert Chandler's fine translation of The Railway by Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov. The Rossica Prize, timely proof that Russia's peerless literary culture still thrives amid interesting times, will be given on 24 May.

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