Organised by the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Morning Herald, the Patrick White Playwrights' Award for a full-length unproduced play written by an Australian playwright is worth $20,000. The judges are playwrights Beatrix Christian and David Williamson, actor-director Robyn Nevin, and director Benedict Andrews. Entries close on 26 October.

Poet, novelist and librettist Peter Goldsworthy, currently in Britain promoting his new book of poetry, will write the 'Diary' in the next issue.

Boldest Title of the Year surely goes to the forthcoming memoirs of Zoë Caldwell, the great Australian actress who settled in the USA in the 1960s. Text Publishing will release I Will Be Cleopatra at the end of October. Caldwell, last seen here in Medea in 1984, will also deliver the Norton Lectures in October at the New York Public Library.

Li Cunxin, a former principal with the Australian Ballet, now a stockbroker, has also written his memoirs, begging to be titled I Will Invest Romeo. Publishers are vying for Li's account of his remarkable life and career.

La Trobe University is advertising a new kind of degree for Australia: a Bachelor of Western Culture. It will take students through the literature, art, history, philosophy and the political and social ideas of the West from ancient Greece to the present. This three-year course, designed by John Carroll, John Hirst and Robert Manne, will commence in 2002.

Aficionados of poetry should hasten to the Landmark Park Royal Hotel in Potts Point for the XXI World Congress of Poets, which will run from October 7 to 11. Readings will take place all over town, from Government House to The Rocks. Mabel Lee, translator of Nobel Laureate Gao Xing Jian, will chair a translation seminar.

Meanwhile, autobiographers will reveal all during a two-day conference at the National Library of Australia. 'The Secret Self: Exploring Biography and Autobiography' will run from October 19 to 20. Participants include Louis Nowra, Nadia Wheatley and Margaret Scott.

During the promotion of his new novel, Dirt Music, Tim Winton will be touring widely, including an appearance at Gleebooks on 17 November.

On 10 October, Deryn Rees-Jones and Michael Murphy, visiting British poets, will read at the Victorian Writers' Centre. On 18 October, Carmel Bird and Garry Disher will be in conversation about 'the art of crafting fiction'.