"I'd been waiting for the manuscript to be sent back really, rejected. It was such a wonderful surprise," she added.

The Great Lie features 16-year-old Nick, the son of the late first Earl of Rikesby, who runs away with a troupe of travelling players who take him to London, where he comes to Marlowe's attention.

"I want to wait until I'm excited about the material again, and I'm excited about Edward, and that it's something that's motivating," she said. "Right now, it feels like homework. And when things feel like homework they go very, very slowly for me. So it's still not a 'It's not gonna happen!' I want to do it when I can do it right."

"For my seventh birthday I was given a boxed set of the Narnia Books by CS Lewis. The last of them, The Last Battle had the words 'Winner of the Carnegie Medal' on it. I did not know what the Carnegie Medal was, but I knew it was something important.

It was the first literary award I had ever heard of. And if the Narnia books had won it, then it had to be the most important literary award there ever was.

Somewhere deep inside me, but not too deep, a seven-year old version of me is amazed and delighted that he's written a book that was given the most important literary award there ever was. And nothing you can say about Bookers or Nobels or Pulitzers will convince him otherwise."

The unpublished "A Family Sketch" was a 64-page, handwritten manuscript that Twain wrote around 1896 or 1897 for Olivia "Susy" Clemens, who inspired some of his stories and even wrote her own biography of her father. The document also reminisced about his own childhood and was described as the missing chapter of his autobiography.

"What initially began as a tribute to his late -- and undisputed favorite -- daughter Susy thus devolved into a narrative that encompasses the whole of this family and friends as well as glimpses of incidents of his own childhood," auctioneer Sotheby's said in a statement.

In 1936, Ernest Hemingway was already a legend when he met Gellhorn, a novelist and one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th Century, in a local bar in Key West. Their tumultuous romance and subsequent 5-year marriage took them to the Spanish Civil War as Gellhorn stood toe-to-toe with the literary master, putting his famous bravado and iconic style to the test. Gellhorn's competitive nature inspired the novelist to pen one of its most famous novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The 55-year-old was previously nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999 for her novel The Poisonwood Bible.

The Lacuna centres on writer Harrison Shepherd, and his social-climbing mother Salome, who ends up mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Riviera.

The role leads to a job in Riviera's house, where Harrison makes himself useful to the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo and the exiled Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky.

"We wanted to make the Sorrento a cultural and social epicenter," she said. One offering is "Chamber vs. Chamber," which pairs, for example, an orchestral percussionist and a rock musician.

Among the other events there, Garry Wills has discussed his book, "Bomb Power," and two of the principal dancers of the Pacific Northwest Ballet shared stories of life behind the scenes at the ballet.

About a year ago, the Liberty Hotel in Boston started offering special events every night, including cooking demonstrations by its executive chef, art exhibitions featuring local artists, and fashion shows where models strutted though the lobby and up the escalators.

Lancashire took 16 of her novels, written over more than 50 years, and fed the text into a computer program. The computer then spit out data about the vocabulary of the works, such as the frequency of different words and the number of different words used in each text.

When Lancashire looked at the results for Christie's 73rd novel, written when she was 81 years old, he saw something strange. Her use of words like "thing," "anything," "something," "nothing" - terms that Lancashire classifies as "indefinite words" - spiked. At the same time, number of different words she used dropped by 20 percent. "That is astounding," says Lancashire, "that is one-fifth of her vocabulary lost."

Neil Blair, partner at the Christopher Little Agency (CLA) which represents Rowling, said the agency was "currently considering all the options and opportunities that this evolving space provides". The agency was "actively" looking, whereas previously it had just been "monitoring the developing area", he said.

Richard Charkin, executive director of Rowling's print publisher Bloomsbury, declined to comment on whether Bloomsbury was in discussions with the author on e-book plans, saying: "That's between us and CLA."

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