The digital humanities have witnessed a clear development in recent years due partly to their adoption of Semantic Web and linked data technologies and the creation of knowledge bases. In this work, we target the creation of an ontology and knowledge base for literature data representation based on the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM). IFLA LRM is the main model for book-related data, allowing for a fine representation of the various layers that constitute a book. However, by design, it doesn’t deal with some aspects usually available in literature databases, such as information about authors, literary awards or book themes. As a result, LRM requires some extensions to be able to represent ancillary data. Another challenge is the querying of IFLA LRM knowledge bases, with a performance cost that comes with the fine-grained expressivity of the LRM model, which creates longer and therefore typically slower SPARQL queries. In this work, we propose an extension to the IFLA LRM ontology called IFLA LRM* that targets these limitations including a connection to the vocabulary Schema.org and to the taxonomies Thema and Dewey Decimal, and the representation of literary awards. We also present a practical case study on using our extended model to create a Quebec literature knowledge base, discussing the interest of our extensions.