Yet even though WGA brass is authorized to call a strike at any time after midnight, they won't do so until at least after they hold a membership meeting 7 p.m. Thursday downtown at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There also appeared to be a gathering consensus that negotiations might stretch into next week.

"Both sides worked on modifications to their proposals, (and) the guild indicated that they were preparing a comprehensive package and would be ready to present it tomorrow," AMPTP president Nick Counter said after the latest bargaining session. "We are committed to a fair, reasonable and sensible agreement that is beneficial for everyone. However, opportunities do not come without challenges.

"We will not agree to any proposals that impose unreasonable restrictions and unjustified costs," he said. "We will not ignore the challenges of today's economic realities, the shifts in audience taste and viewing habits and the unpredictability of still-evolving technology."

Her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and is ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the top selling novel of all time. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies. Last week, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Quill Award for best audiobook of the year for its belated debut on audio.

According to the citation, Lee is being honored for "an outstanding contribution to America's literary tradition. At a critical moment in our history, her beautiful book, To Kill a Mockingbird, helped focus the nation on the turbulent struggle for equality."

The award will be presented to Lee during a ceremony at the White House on Monday, November 5. The ceremony will also honor 1992 Nobel economics prize winner Gary Becker; Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins; civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks; and former House Foreign Affairs committee chairman Henry Hyde.

Robert Eisele, writer- producer, most recently of the upcoming "The Great Debaters." When the 1988 strike was called, Eisele had just ended one season as a supervising producer on "The Equalizer."

Contrary to the widely held view that leftists ran the guild, Eisele recalled a strong difference of opinion from writers who didn't like unionism, or those who, unlike himself, hadn't saved enough money to afford a work stoppage. After one pre-strike meeting at the Hollywood Palladium, a friend nearly got into a fistfight when he was challenged by an anti-strike member. "I was at his shoulder, ready to throw down if necessary," he said. But after the strike began, the union held together, he said. To pass time when they weren't working, members gathered at one another's homes to read excerpts of their work.

"It gets lonely not being on a show, so you seek the comfort of other writers," he said. "Some people read a script or poetry, little essays or excerpts from plays. Many of us take our work very seriously, though it's primarily to entertain. It's the craft with which we express ourselves. To have that business close up on you, none of us want to do it, but we will do it if we have to." During the strike, some writers gained from having spent time with family, other writers and spec writing. But all lost money while careers stood still. Yet Eisele credits the sacrifices of previous strikers for enabling him to earn a good living with his work, putting two children through college. He believes in doing the same for others, including a son now working for producers.

"I tell young writers, 'We have to stay the course.' I say, 'If you can afford a Mercedes, get a Camry. If you can afford a Bentley, get a Mercedes.' I tell them to tighten their belts and be optimistic."

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"We wanted to use the medium to take on the question of whether torture is ever justified," Mr. Singer said. "To be clear, we make TV to entertain, but we entertain a lot of people. And while we didn't want to use the show as a platform to proselytize, we did feel it might be refreshing to create an episode of television with a real debate on the question of torture and whether/when the American government should engage in torture."

The resulting episode, entitled "Harm" and airing tonight at 10 p.m. on NBC, is about whether and in what situations torture is justified. "It specifically deals with the question of if our government or the private military corporations they hire should be engaged in torture," Mr. Singer said. Characters from the show ­ like Olivia Benson, Elliot Stabler, Casey Novak debate the question while the actress Elizabeth McGovern guest stars as a doctor who has been hired to facilitate torture abroad.

"In our research we found that a number of American doctors were involved overseeing torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and this led to another question: can a doctor, someone who's taken the Hippocratic Oath, participate in torture for what she deems to be the greater good?," Mr. Singer said.

BBC Television, which flirted with Gaiman a decade ago when it made a disappointing small-screen version of his London-based novel Neverwhere, has been courting him with renewed vigour. "Things have changed so much. The BBC, bless their little cotton socks, now like fantasy and now like me a lot and I would love to do something more for them," he says. "I've been in talks with the BBC for about two years about doing an original fantasy series for them, which I keep putting off because my plate is so full. I think it's time to clear some plate for them. My agents would rather that I didn't take eight months and do something for the BBC – writing a Hollywood movie is infinitely more remunerative. But there's something so special for me about doing English television and assembling a great cast."

*****

On the morning of this interview he had been a guest on BBC Radio 3. "On one side of me is an Oxford professor of English and on the other is Bernard Malamud's biographer. I'm being taken seriously on a level that would have been inconceivable for someone who wrote comics, children's stories and fantasies to have been taken seriously 15 years ago. It simply wouldn't have happened. Not only am I there but they are perfectly accepting of all of those hats that I wear; the comic thing is cool and exciting and hip and the graphic novels are in and they're great. They have been in and great long enough that now people are regarding them as part of the literary landscape and not as a novelty."

By now we all know that JK Rowling shocked the wizarding world last weekend by outing beloved grandfatherly wizard Albus Dumbledore as being gay. BWE.tv has leared exclusively, through our shadowy network of wizard tabloid operatives, that Rowling made the announcement only to pre-empt the shocking expose in this week's People Magazine based on magical gossipmongering blogger Rita Skeeter's sordid allegations about the wizard's sexuality. Here's an exclusive preview of the magazine.

"To me, the religious parallels have always been obvious," Rowling said. "But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going." At the end of her latest and final installment in the series, there are specific references to Christianity and themes of life after death and resurrection. At one point Harry visits his parents' graves and finds two biblical passages inscribed on their tombstones.

"They are very British books, so on a very practical note, Harry was going to find biblical quotations on tombstones," she said. "But I think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones ...they sum up, they almost epitomise, the whole series." However the author, who was brought up an Anglican and is now a member of the Church of Scotland, said she still wrestled with the concept of an afterlife. "The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot.

"On any given moment if you asked me if I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes - that I do believe in life after death. "But it's something I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

Against all the odds, and seeing off competition from favourites Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones, rank outsider Anne Enright was tonight awarded the Man Booker prize for her "powerful, uncomfortable and even at times angry book" The Gathering.

Howard Davies, chair of the panel, described it as "an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language". No picnic, it was described by the Observer's critic as "a story of family dysfunction, made distinctive by an exhilarating bleakness of tone". Davies said: "It's accessible. It's somewhat bitter - but it's perfectly accessible. People will be pretty excited by it when they read it."

Enright herself told Radio 4's Today programme this morning: "When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up. In that case they shouldn't really pick up my book. It's the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie". Enright's victory wins her a total of £52,500, including the £2,500 accorded to each shortlisted writer.

The action does not mean the two sides are much closer to a deal, but it does remove what had been a major stumbling block in negotiations. The two sides have made little progress since they began talks this summer, leading many in Hollywood to prepare for the first walkout by writers in nearly two decades. "In the overriding interest of keeping the industry working and removing what has become an emotional impediment and excuse by the WGA not to bargain, the AMPTP withdrew its recoupment proposal," Nick Counter, the industry's chief negotiator, told guild leaders this morning.

However, Counter quickly added that while producers would not scale back residuals, nor were they ready to grant guild demands for higher residuals for home video and digital downloads of movies and TV shows, underscoring how far apart the two sides remain. For decades, Hollywood studios have made residual payments to writers, directors and actors when their work is rerun on television, or sold for release on home video and in foreign markets. Citing rising production and marketing costs and declining market share, studios had proposed changes in the decades-old system, namely that they would pay residuals only after they had recouped their costs.

*****

Guild leaders downplayed the concession. In a statement, the guild's negotiating committee said it welcomed the alliance's decision to "take one of its many rollbacks off the table," but stressed that key differences remain. "The remaining rollbacks would gut our contract and will never be acceptable to writers."

According to one agent familiar with the project, Lucas' plan is to recruit several freelancers - aka "writers of real significance" - to spend a week at the Skywalker Ranch in November to come up with story ideas for the series. The agent also said that Lucas has indicated a desire to hire writers from other countries. The scribes would then disperse and write the 13 episodes that would be produced and financed by Lucas.

When Lucas first began recruiting Hollywood writers for the project as early as February 2006, according to the agent, his original intent was to produce 26 episodes before he went on the lookout for a network partner. The news put fans in the frenzy as speculation swirled that the live-action series would take place between Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars IV: A New Hope, though the agent believes those rumors are unfounded. Plot points for the series, as a result, remain sketchy.

Doris Lessing was out grocery shopping near her home in London yesterday when the Swedish Academy announced she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She returned from the store to find a media circus, the wire services reported. "Oh Christ!" she said, when told about the monumental honor. "I couldn't care less." "This has been going on for 30 years," Lessing told the journalists. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush." Holding an impromptu news conference, the prickly Lessing said, "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. . . . I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

Jonathan Burnham of HarperCollins, Lessing's publisher in the United States, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair when the announcement was made. "Doris is one of the most important writers of this generation," he said from Germany. "And as a woman writer, she has broken through boundaries and given inspiration to a whole new generation." For six decades, British novelist Lessing has written works of fiction that explore the sometimes painful intertwining of the political and the personal. In awarding her the prize-of-all-writing-prizes, the academy championed Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Lessing's work had been of great importance both to other writers and to the broader field of literature, academy secretary Horace Engdahl told Reuters. He said members of the academy had discussed her as a potential laureate for years. "Now the moment was right. Perhaps we could say that she is one of the most carefully considered decisions in the history of the Nobel Prize," Engdahl told the news service. "She has opened up a new area of experience that earlier had not been very accepted in literature. That has to do with, for instance, female sexuality."

The ripe rumor going through the rafters at the Louis Vuitton show Sunday night was that company chief Yves Carcelle had called journalist Dana Thomas personally to inform her that she would never be invited to another Vuitton show or event as long as he was still in charge. It was apparent that Carcelle was miffed by the veteran fashion industry reporter's new book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, and in particular by how she called LVMH Moët Hennessey's crown jewel brand "the McDonald's of the luxury industry: it's far and away the leader, brags of millions sold, has stores at all the top tourist sites--usually steps away from a McD's--and has a logo as recognizable as the Golden Arches." During the brief phone conversation, Thomas was said to have replied, in a cordial yet terse manner, "Thank you very much."

Post show, Carcelle confirmed to Fashion Week Daily that he had spoken to Thomas and decided it would not be appropriate for her to attend Sunday's show, but echoed a clearer thought. "We think she [Dana] wrote some things that were just not true; for example, how Vuitton marks up products 13 times what it costs us to produce," he explained. "I called her to express my unhappiness with the book. But if she would like to come to the show next season, she is welcome to." His wife, Rebecca, added, "You don't have the reputation Yves has by speaking to people in a derogatory manner." Wanting to move on from the subject, Carcelle concluded, "She complained to The Washington Post and The New York Post; if we're the McDonald's of luxury, then she is the McDonald's of press!"

"We are trying to get as much stuff as possible shoved through," said one studio VP. "It's as hot as I've ever seen it. And whether or not they strike on Nov. 1, we have to act as if they will." On the feature side, studios are no longer taking writing pitches and are pretty much limiting themselves to making deals on fully developed packages. Warner Bros. and Universal, for example, have put out the word to agents: Don't bring in any spec scripts until the situation resolves itself.

"A strike on Nov. 1 is a real option," WGA West prexy Patric Verrone told Daily Variety on Monday. "What I'm hearing from our screenwriters and showrunners is that they're being asked to schedule additional table reads, prepare additional scripts and squeeze in more shows, which may be physically impossible in that amount of time." On the TV side, the nets are scrambling to figure out how they'll fill primetime with no new scripted shows and trying to get pilot scripts completed as quickly as possible. There's also been a rash of series commitments in recent weeks, with nets handing out an unusually large number of six- and 13-episode orders.

Agents admit that the pace of feature dealmaking has stayed hectic in recent weeks -- but only for short-term projects. "Making any deals in long-term feature development has become really tough," one tenpercenter groused. Producers and execs say available writing jobs have been drying up in recent days. "Unless you're a triple-A high-end rewriter, you're not getting an assignment now," one prominent producer said. One agent noted that feature animation writing jobs may become a hot area for scribes in coming months since that arena's not covered by the WGA.

*****

As a result, an early strike could spell doom for some newer shows struggling in the ratings. "If Fox has to shut down a show like 'K-Ville' in the middle of filming the seventh episode, they might just decide it makes more sense to simply cancel it," one agent said. That's because keeping the "K-Ville" sets in place and its cast together would be costly. If the show were a hit, keeping the skein in a holding pattern would make sense, but given its weak early numbers, Fox might simply decide it makes sense to cut and run. That decision would have a cost, too. TV shows generally need to produce 13 episodes to earn international coin. If shows such as "K-Ville" -- or CBS' ratings-challenged "Cane" or NBC's "Bionic Woman" -- wrap before they get to 13 segs, they'll likely end up a total loss for both the network and the studio that produces the show.

The Swedish Academy said on Friday it will announce the 2007 Nobel Laureate in Literature on October 11, with odds-makers tipping well-tried names to take a prize that often goes to the obscure or controversial. Bookmaker Ladbrokes, which takes bets on the literary world's most prestigious award, has Italian novelist and essayist Claudio Magris as its favorite, followed by Australian "bush" poet Les Murray and American novelist Philip Roth. Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer lies fourth on the list with Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis in fifth.

Barring Murray, all have been suggested as possible winners in years past. The short list for the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize is closely guarded and the winner is often a surprise -- sometimes obscure enough to send reporters and literary scholars scurrying to reference books or the Internet. But Ladbrokes has called it right for three years running with the leader in its wagering winning the Nobel, including last year's winner, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk was seen as a politically-charged choice in a year that saw him charged with violating a hotly debated law prohibiting insults to "Turkishness."

The Swedish Academy says politics played no role. "It was a decision taken on purely literary grounds. There is never a political aim in the Academy's decision," Academy head Horace Engdahl told Reuters in an e-mail interview this week. "There is sometimes a political effect, but in that case it is unintended and usually not calculable in advance."

"We have had six across-the-table sessions and have been met with only silence and stonewalling from the WGA leadership," AMPTP president Nick Counter said. "We have attempted to engage on major issues, but no dialogue has been forthcoming from the WGA leadership."

The WGA was succinct in its public message. "While the WGA remains determined to make a fair deal, at this stage of the negotiations the AMPTP is still stuck on its rollback proposals including profit-based residuals," guild negotiators said. "Our members will not stand for that. The entertainment industry is successful and growing like never before. Writers, whose creativity is at the heart of that success and growth, are committed to sharing in it."

But Counter complained that "WGA leadership apparently has no intention to bargain in good faith (and) is hidebound to strike." The WGA is currently conducting a strike-authorization vote, with balloting to extend until Oct. 18. If a majority of its 12,000 members give leadership the request authority, guild brass could to call a strike whenever strategically most advantageous.

*****

The WGA noted they expect to return to the bargaining table Tuesday. But Counter said it's unclear what can be accomplished at this point. "The WGA leadership refuses to engage in any sort of discussion, much less bargaining, on either our proposals or theirs," the AMPTP president said. "We have presented empirical data to support our positions. Our presentations are met with no questions, interchange or any attempt to come to an agreement."

Keenan is the author of two previous comic novels, Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz. He was a writer for Frasier; and his first produced script for that series, titled "The Matchmaker," received an Emmy Award nomination, a GLAAD Media Award and the 1995 Writers' Guild Award for Episodic Comedy. He won a writing Emmy in 1996 for another episode of Frasier, and two additional Emmy nominations including one which won the 2001 Writers' Guild Award for Episodic Comedy. Keenan was with Frasier for six years, rising from executive story editor to co-producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and then executive producer. In 2007, he shared an Annie Award for best writing of an animated feature for "Flushed Away". He has written and produced several episodes of Desperate Housewives.

The two runners-up for the Thurber Prize were Bob Newhart for I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!: And Other Things That Strike Me As Funny and Merrill Markoe for Walking In Circles Before Lying Down.

Three esteemed judges selected the winner of this year's Thurber Prize for American Humor: humorist Bill Scheft, the former head monologue writer for the Late Show with David Letterman and 2006 Thurber Pirze finalist for his novel Time Won't Let Me; Melissa Bank, author of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing; and Chuck Klosterman, whose latest book, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, is a collection of his essays about music, television and sports, among other topics.

The Thurber Prize for American Humor was first presented in 1997 to Ian Frazier for his book Coyote vs. Acme. In 1999, the prize went to the editorial staff of the satirical magazine The Onion for Our Dumb Century; in 2001, to David Sedaris, best-selling author of Me Talk Pretty One Day. In 2004, the Prize was made an annual award and was given to Christopher Buckley for his comic novel, No Way to Treat a First Lady. In 2005, it was presented to Jon Stewart, Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum for America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. Five-time Emmy winner Alan Zweibel won in 2006 for his novel, The Other Shulman.

"Building upon Doubleday's long and proud tradition of publishing religious books, The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group will unite in one division the successful-and complementary-publishing programs of Doubleday Religion and WaterBrook Multnomah," said Stephen Rubin, Doubleday president and publisher, in a memo to employees. "Previously, each had been a separate division within Doubleday Broadway. Together, they will form the first division in our industry to encompass works from the full array of Judeo-Christian traditions as well as from other major religions."

Steve Cobb will be the president and publisher of the group, with Kevin Tobin serving as vice president and director of business operations. Both will report to Michael Palgon, executive vice president and deputy publisher of Doubleday Broadway. Trace Murphy, editor-in-chief of Doubleday Religion, and Andrew Corbin, senior editor, will report to Tobin.

Additionally, Bill Barry, the publisher of Doubleday Religion, will be leaving the company as his position has been eliminated in the consolidation. Barry originally joined Doubleday in 1979 at Image Books, the then-religious imprint. He left to help run IDG Books Worldwide/Hungry Minds, Inc. and DK Publishing before returning to Doubleday in 2005.

"The use of the fantastic allows access to the story in a wider, more universal way than straightforward historical fiction set in a given period. I've been saying for years that good fiction is interesting things happening to interesting people. In a lot of the commercial bestsellers (any genre, any form, any field), you're going to have interesting things happening to stupefyingly uninteresting characters, and in a lot of the lauded literary contemporary fiction you'll have carefully thought-out characters with nothing remotely engaging happening to them. But it's not a zero-sum game, not either/or. It's difficult to deliver both, but that's our mandate when we write."

*****

"In some ways, Ysabel is a departure from what I've been doing, and in some ways it's not. I'm still fascinated by the same things I've been fascinated by for 15 or 20 years: working with history, examining the ways in which the past doesn't go away from us and impacts on what we do, how we need to acknowledge and confront what went before in order to know where we're going. But because it's contemporary it's a departure, and the publishers made the decision to play up that fact so no one would buy the new book expecting that this time Kay will do Aztecs of the Indian subcontinent, or whatever. That was a conscious marketing thing, and I think it worked because there's next to no indicator that people here or in Canada have been buying the book without some awareness that it will be different. When you're a moving target, there's no way to assume that the readers will want to move with you, but the one thing you can make sure of is that they aren't bemused by the change."

Negotiations are under way for Clooney to follow in the footsteps of rock star Bono and fashion designer Giorgio Armani and guest edit an edition of the paper for the Africa charity Product Red. If talks bear fruit, Clooney, whose high profile campaigning against the genocide in Darfur chimes with the Independent's own editorial stance, would edit the paper for a day next year, possibly in March. Clooney and his journalist father, Nick, have lobbied the UN about the violence in the region and travelled to Sudan in a bid to stop the killings.

The actor, who won his best supporting actor Academy Award for Syriana, has described his Darfur campaign as an attempt to "use the credit card that you get for being famous in the right instances whenever you can". Over the past year the Independent and Independent on Sunday have run 294 articles about Darfur, including a front-page article in August by actress Mia Farrow about how she had witnessed suffering in the region at first hand. The paper also ran an interview with Clooney about Darfur when Armani "guest designed" the paper in September last year. The actor's Hollywood press agent denied that the paper had been in talks with Clooney. However, MediaGuardian.co.uk understands that PR agency Freud Communications, which handles the Product Red campaign, is negotiating on behalf of the paper.

The Independent was unavailable for comment and a spokesman at Freud said that the agency was not currently planning anything with the Independent. The paper secured Bono as its guest editor in May last year in a blaze of publicity. At the time the Independent said the Bono edition sold about 70,000 extra copies; one industry source said the increase was closer to 50,000 copies.