[Windows Media - 5 minutes]
MAN BOOKER PRIZE
In London, Aravind Adiga has won the $126,000 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel 'The White Tiger', only the third debut novelist ever to receive the award.
The 33-year-old Adiga arrived in Australia in 1990 and holds dual Australian-Indian citizenship. He now lives in Mumbai but spent most of his teenage years living with his father in Parramatta, where he attended the James Ruse Agricultural High School.
The book tells of a rickshaw driver who is prepared to do almost anything to get ahead. It was a novel that "shocked and entertained in equal measure", according to the judges.
Adiga was the youngest finalist in this year's Man Booker Prize. Others included Sydney author Steve Toltz also for a debut novel, 'A Fraction of the Whole'.
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AUSTRALIA BUSINESS ARTS FOUNDATION AWARDS
Business and arts leaders from Sydney were prominent in the 2008 Australia Business Arts Foundation Awards presented in Melbourne last week.
Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, won the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Arts Business Leadership Award.
Ian Darling won the Richard Pratt Business Arts Leadership Award. Darling is an award-winning film-maker and the chairman of the Sydney Theatre Company and the STC Foundation. He is a social entrepreneur, the head of the Caledonia Foundation which assists disadvantaged young people.
Robert Albert, patriarch of the music publishers J. Albert and Son and hit record label Albert Productions, won the Goldman Sachs JB Were Philanthropy Leadership Award. Over the past 30 years Albert's name has appeared among the most generous donors to the Sydney Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, The Australian Ballet and Opera Australia.
Law firm Freehills and theatre company, Company B won the Toyota Community Award and also Australia Council Arts for Young People Award. Freehills funds Company B's Youth Engagement Program that assists disadvantaged young people in Sydney and regional New South Wales.
Details of these and all the other winners can be downloaded from www.abaf.org.au.
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ARTPOST
Artpost is a new interactive website and short video series for TV broadcast that will showcase artists working in regional and remote parts of Australia. Users can explore their work by way of a map of Australia.
It's a partnership between the ABC and Regional Arts Australia and was launched by Peter Garrett, the Federal Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the
Arts, at the Art at the Heart conference in Alice Springs.
The site also provides the tools for students, teachers, art lovers and artists to create short videos about who they are and their work, for inclusion on the digital map. These videos will also be broadcast on ABC1 and ABC2.
You can find Artpost at www.abc.net.au/artpost.
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OPERA AUSTRALIA
On a brighter note for Opera Australia, which has been subject to critical comment by singers and by Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones, it has been announced that Mazda will extended its support of Opera Australia for three more years. The partnership with Opera Australia began in 2005.
Each year Mazda supports two major productions on the Australian opera calendar, a ticket package aimed at introducing opera to new audiences, and has naming rights to the Mazda Opera in the Sydney Domain.
The renewed partnership kicks off with Mazda Opera in the Domain in Sydney on Saturday 31 January next year.
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BUNJILAKA COMMUNITY EXHIBITION PROGRAM
Applications are now open for the Bunjilaka Community Exhibition Program 2009, offering Victorian Koorie artists, either as individuals or as communities, the chance to feature in exhibitions next year in Bunjilaka.
All forms of artwork will be considered, including fibre craft, woodwork, glasswork, fashion, painting, pottery, jewellery, photography, and film.
Artists must identify as Indigenous and be from Victoria and the artwork must be available to be on display for four months. Artists must be able to transport their exhibition to and from the Birrarung Gallery, and in the case of natural materials, must come without pest management issues. Artists must be able to attend opening events.
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MUSICIANS PROTEST UNAUTHORISED USE OF SONGS FOR US ELECTION CAMPAIGNS
Academy Award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has joined an all-star line-up of Australian talent in the role of the voice of Max in the new claymation feature film 'Mary and Max'.
'Mary and Max' is the first film from writer/director Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs since their animated short 'Harvie Krumpet' won the Oscar for Best Short Film - Animated in 2004.
'Mary and Max' is a simple tale of pen-friendship between two very different people; Mary Dinkle, a chubby lonely eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horovitz, a 44-year-old, severely obese, Jewish man with Asperger's Syndrome living in the chaos of New York.
Like 'Harvie Krumpet', the film 'Mary and Max' is innocent but not naive, as it takes us on a journey that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity, kleptomania, sexual difference, trust, copulating dogs, religious difference, agoraphobia and much much more, if that's possible to imagine.
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