Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Author George R.R. Martin says the next Song of Ice and Fire book has a real chance of coming out in 2018. But readers shouldn’t count on it yet. In a weekend posting on his website, Martin wrote that he’s working hard on The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth volume in the series adapted into the HBO hit Game of Thrones. He added that he has “good days and bad days” and is still months away from finishing. Meanwhile, he thinks it’s “likely” that he’ll have his first Fire and Blood book out by late 2018 or early 2019. The new book is a history of House Targaryen, which has the motto “Fire and Blood.” His conclusion: one, maybe two Westeros books in 2018. “A boy can dream,” he wrote.
■ French President Emmanuel Macron has received pop singer and philanthropist Bono at the Elysee Palace in Paris for talks about poverty. Bono met with Macron for over an hour Monday to discuss the U2 frontman’s nongovernmental organization, the One Campaign, which its website says takes “action to end extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.” Accompanied by French first lady Brigitte Macron afterward, Bono said one of the main issues in the fruitful talks was the education of girls and women in Africa. Bono, a high-profile activist, is no stranger to the French presidential palace, having met former Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. The singer was awarded the Legion of Honor, the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits, in 2003.
■ Shakespeare’s Globe — London’s open-air, Elizabethan-style playhouse — announced Monday that Olivier Award-winning actress Michelle Terry will be its new artistic director. Terry will take up the post in April 2018. She replaces Emma Rice, who is leaving early after claiming a lack of support from the company’s board. Terry has a long association with the Globe, where her roles have included Rosalind in As You
Like It and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has also performed for Britain’s National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and played the lead in Henry V at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Terry said she was looking forward to helping artists and audiences “reclaim and rediscover” the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as new writers. Terry’s appointment came as a surprise, since she has little directing experience, but she is not the first actor to head the Globe. Academy Award-winner Mark Rylance led the company for a decade.