Geordie Williamson will be the new Picador publisher, taking over from Alex Craig who resigned last month. This means, of course, that The Australian newspaper will have to find a new chief literary critic. Williamson will start at the publisher next month and perhaps it's not surprising that someone who has been a bookseller, author and critic should say he has been circling publishing for ages in his "para-literary career". Once he had accepted the Picador gig he realised he had been undergoing a long preparation for the move. While he was aware of the decline in importance of paperback rights since the '70s and '80s  – remember when Picador had all the big names in paperback? – he said he was surprised at the strength of the imprint. "Alex Craig has done a great job; there's a stable of really good stuff." He is particularly interested in nature writing as it has emerged over the past 15 years – "not in the sense of Cold Comfort Farm, which put people off nature writing for 50 years" – but because it was the most urgent and fascinating field of non-fiction writing. He also wants to find more younger Australian voices and some strong indigenous writing, "which is where questions of storytelling and place intersect". As to the future of publishing in Australia, he said he had more faith in it than the publishing of newspapers: "We face the challenges of parallel importation again and Amazon as a bricks and mortar force. The question is can we create a sturdy enough ecosystem to sustain it?"

The Vida count goes on

Vida, the US research body that examines gender equality – or lack of it – in the reviewing business, has produced its count for 2015. It reports some progress in the US but also identifies some recalcitrants who appear to have made no adjustment to their ranks of reviewers despite the six years of Vida counts. The Times Literary Supplement, for example, has been almost consistent with only about 29 per cent of its reviews being written by women. The New York Review of Books had 52 reviews written by women compared with 216 by men, The London Review of Books had figures of 39 compared with 153, and The New Yorker, 232 compared with 453.

The slow wheels in Russia

J.M. Coetzee is the only Australian connection to Russia's Yansnaya Polyana award for foreign fiction. The award, named after Tolstoy's country estate, has selected 31 books for a longlist. What it really shows is that books take a while to be published in Russian. So Coetzee is up for his 2013 book The Childhood of Jesus, while Jonathan Franzen is up for The Corrections (2001), Siri Hustvedt for What I Loved (2003) and Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things (1997).