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 related to arts and literature:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)