Fiona Shaw, best known for her role as Aunt Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, is up for a Tony in the category “Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play” for her role in Medea.

There’s Wicked Whispers in today’s Daily Mail about the cast from the Harry Potter films attempts to get a hold of Book 5: The regular cast of the Harry Potter films has been rebuffed, after asking for preview copies of the new J. K. Rowling book, The Order Of The Phoenix, due out next month. …read more!

According to the Bristol Evening Post, Bloomsbury plans on publishing both a Latin version (titled “Harrius Potter Et Philosophi Lapis”) and Welsh version (titled “Harri Potter Maen Yr Atbronydd”) of Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone this July. Here’s a cute example of the first line of the book in latin: “Dominus et Domina Dursley, …read more!

There’s an article in this week’s Publishers Weekly that discusses how smart the timing of “Order of the Phoenix” is and how carefully Scholastic has planned the release.

Menlo Park’s Almanac has an article about the Las Lomitas Education Foundation‘s Hoedown – their 18th annual auction and fundraising event being held May 17th at Portola Farms – will be auctioning off a special Harry Potter treat: A read-into-the-night sleepover in the La Entrada school library on the night of the release of the …read more!

Today’s Guardian has a great roundup of authors, writers and artists accused of “copying” someone elses material or taking action over being copied themselves. It includes a list of J.K. Rowling’s recent troubles: JK Rowling was accused of violating the intellectual property rights of Nancy K Stouffer, who believed her book The Legend of Rah …read more!

An interesting article from icWales that mentions Snowdonia Taxidermy Studios in Llanrwst, Conwy provided many of the animals in the films including an owl and a snake.

According to the BBC, Donald Parfitt, 44, of Worlingham, Suffolk, (a forklift driver at Clays Printers in Bungay), admitted to stealing & trying to sell 3 chapters from the book to various newspapers.

The Z Review is reporting that a source close to WB says Rowan Atkinson (of Mr. Bean fame…) has been cast as Voldemort and they’re looking at Richard Wilson for Frank Bryce. Reasons this is not to be considered anything other than rumor: Trelawney hasn’t even been cast in the third film yet; no one …read more!

Thanks to Ginny for taking the time to find the URL for pre-ordering OotP (the English version) in Brazil through Submarino. It will be R$106.90 (or $37.21 US) and will ship after 6/23/2003. Perhaps some local bookstores will do midnight sales like some of the other countries. If any of you hear about midnight book …read more!