Arts and Literature
- 7 March – Del Kathryn Barton wins the 2008 Archibald Prize for You are what is most beautiful about me, a self portrait with Kell and Arella, a self-portrait with her children.
- 13 March – Australian author Sonya Hartnett wins the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for young adult literature.
- 23 May – New South Wales Police seize a number of photographs depicting naked children by artist Bill Henson which were to be exhibited the previous day.
- 19 June – Steven Carroll's novel The Time We Have Taken wins the Miles Franklin Award
- 12 September – Stephen Conte's novel The Zookeeper's War wins the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers by Philip Jones wins the Non-Fiction award.
- 19 September – First-time novelist Andrew Croome wins the Vogel Literary Award for his manuscript about the Petrov affair, Document Z.
- 15 October – Indian-Australian journalist Aravind Adiga wins the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger.
Read more about this topic: 2008 In Australia
Famous quotes containing the words arts and, arts and/or literature:
“I won’t undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”
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“If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”
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