Category: people

Israeli writer Amos Oz has been awarded Germany’s top cultural prize, the Goethe Prize for culture. “Oz, a peace activist, was honoured for his literary work and impressive moral responsibility, according to Petra Roth, mayor of Frankfurt and president of the jury awarding the prize.”

Harper Lee, author of the classic American novel To Kill A Mockingbirg, is famously reclusive and publicity-averse. In fact, she hasn’t given an interview in over forty years. “But like her reclusive character Boo Radley, Lee recently emerged to perform an act of kindness. The author signed a first edition of her book that will be sold to raise money for the seriously ill son of [a] Cookeville, Tenn., police chief.”

When you start your career as a French composer in the mid-twentieth century by openly dismissing Pierre Boulez and writing works that don’t contain a hint of serialism, you’re probably asking for a good swift kick from the establishment. Henri Dutilleux absorbed plenty of them, but somehow, he and his music refused to go away. “His oeuvre vies with that of Boulez to be the most accomplished body of French music in recent years, and yet is relatively neglected because of the 70-year-old [sic] Boulez’s greater clangour. But, like Elliott Carter, the 96-year-old US composer, Dutilleux is one of the indomitable forces of music, carrying on writing after all these years.”

Of the few British artists who came to international prominence soon after the second world war, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who has died aged 81, was one of the most inventive, prolific and various. Chiefly a sculptor (and one of the first to react against the all-pervading influence of Henry Moore), he was also a highly original printmaker, some of whose collage-based silkscreen images are among the finest examples of pop art – the style he was instrumental in shaping.

Norman Mailer has sold his personal archives to the University of Texas for $2.5 million. Stored in nearly 500 boxes weighing more than 20,000 pounds, the trove includes all manner of Mailerabilia dating back to his childhood and especially his early years at Harvard (class of ’43), where he majored in aeronautical engineering and wrote an unpublished novel, “No Percentage.”

Acting great Sir John Mills has died at the age of 97. “He died at home in Buckinghamshire on Saturday morning after a chest infection that lasted several weeks. His films included Great Expectations in 1946 and War and Peace in 1956 and he won an Oscar in 1971 for playing a village idiot in Ryan’s Daughter.”

Miami’s city archaeologist says she was fired because she wasn’t accomodating enough to developers. “What she encountered, she says, was a bureaucracy that thwarted its own preservation rules in order to make developers happy. ‘They did not understand that having an archaeologist on staff meant that if a development was going to destroy a significant archaeological site, I may object to it or, at the very least, try to get a developer to preserve part of the site’.”

“A colleague of an artist whose possession of bacteria sparked a terrorism investigation was questioned Tuesday before a federal grand jury and said the government seems intent on expanding its criminal case against Steven Kurtz.” Kurtz was arrested last year on suspicion of bioterrorism.

Conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn, who led the Nashville Symphony for 22 years and became a local icon of the cultural scene, has died at 75 after a brief battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Schermerhorn is credited with helping to boost the orchestra out of bankruptcy years ago, and with driving it to new professional heights, including major recording contracts and an appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The NSO’s new $120 million concert hall, now under construction in downtown Nashville, will be named for Schermerhorn.

A campaign is being mounted to nominate Leonard Cohen for a Nobel Prize. “I surprised myself when I suddenly figured, in a sort of watershed moment, you know this guy actually does deserve the Nobel Prize. It’s the sort of wry, self-irony there. This man is an amazing poet. He’s not just a good poet; he’s an amazing poet. Cohen, whose first love is poetry, enjoyed later success as a recording star. A companion to the Order of Canada, Cohen had published two internationally acclaimed collections before the age of 30 and went on to write six more. ‘He’s a universal poet in a way that I can’t think of anybody since maybe Homer – in western tradition anyway. And Homer, by the way, was a singer too’.”