This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1998.
Naomi Ellen Watts is a British actress. After her family moved to Australia, she made her film debut there in the drama For Love Alone (1986). She appeared in three television series, Hey Dad..! (1990), Brides of Christ (1991), and Home and Away (1991), and the film Flirting (1991). Ten years later, Watts moved to the United States, where she initially struggled as an actress. She took roles in small-scale films until she starred in her breakthrough role as an aspiring actress in David Lynch's psychological thriller Mulholland Drive in 2001.
Mona Simpson is an American novelist. She has written six novels and studied English at University of California, Berkeley, and languages and literature at Columbia University. She won a Whiting Award for her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986). It was a popular success and adapted as a film by the same name, released in 1999. She wrote a sequel, The Lost Father (1992). Critical recognition has included the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and making the shortlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Off Keck Road (2000).
Alan Irwin Menken is an American composer and conductor, best known for his scores and songs for films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Skydance Animation. Menken's music for The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas (1995) has each won him two Academy Awards. He also composed the scores and songs for Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Newsies (1992), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Home on the Range (2004), Enchanted (2007), Tangled (2010), and Disenchanted (2022), among others. His accolades include winning eight Academy Awards — becoming the second most prolific Oscar winner in the music categories after Alfred Newman, a Tony Award, eleven Grammy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and a Daytime Emmy Award. Menken is one of twenty-one people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
Lukas Daniel Haas is an American actor and musician. His acting career has spanned four decades, during which he has appeared in more than 50 feature films and a number of television shows and stage productions. His notable credits include in the films Witness (1985), Mars Attacks! (1996), Inception (2010), The Revenant (2015) and First Man (2018).
Harlan Coben is an American writer of mystery novels and thrillers. The plots of his novels often involve the resurfacing of unresolved or misinterpreted events in the past, murders, or fatal accidents and have multiple twists. Twelve of his novels have been adapted for film and television.
David Levithan is an American young adult fiction author and editor. He has written numerous works featuring strong male gay characters, most notably Boy Meets Boy and Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. Six of Levithan's books have won or been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature, making him the most celebrated author in the category.
DHX Cookie Jar Inc. was a Canadian media, production, animation studio, and distribution company owned by DHX Media. The company was first established in 1976 as CINAR Films Inc., a Montreal-based studio that was heavily involved in children's entertainment. The company's business model, which included the licensing of its properties into educational markets, had a significant impact on its success; by 1999, CINAR held CDN$1.5 billion of the overall children's television market.
Mona the Vampire is an animated children's television series based on the children's book of the same name written and illustrated by Sonia Holleyman. The series aired in Canada on YTV from September 13, 1999, to February 22, 2006; in France, it first aired on France 3 on October 30, 2000.
Kevin Connolly is an American actor and director. He is best known for his role as Eric Murphy in the HBO series Entourage, and his role as the eldest son Ryan Malloy in the 1990s television sitcom Unhappily Ever After. Connolly is also a director, having directed many television episodes as well as the films Gardener of Eden, Dear Eleanor, and Gotti.
Andrew McGahan was an Australian novelist. His first novel Praise is considered to be part of the Australian literary genre of grunge lit. His novel The White Earth won the 2005 Miles Franklin Award.
Richard B. "Rich" Handler is an American businessman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Jefferies since 2001, making him the longest-serving CEO on Wall Street.
The Buxtehude Bull is an award for youth literature, established in 1971 by Winfried Ziemann, a local book merchant from Buxtehude, a Hanseatic City located in the Hamburg Metropolitan Region. The town council took over the sponsorship of the award in 1981. The award is given annually to the best children's or young-adults' book published in German in the preceding year. The writer is presented with a small steel statue of the bull Ferdinand, from the popular work The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, and also receives a monetary prize of €5,000.
Neil Claude Cross is a British novelist and scriptwriter, best known as the creator of the drama series Luther and Hard Sun. He is also the showrunner for the TV adaptation of The Mosquito Coast, which began airing in 2021.
Sterling Gray Van Wagenen is an American film and stage producer, writer, director, and convicted sex offender. He is a co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival, and, in association with his former cousin-in-law Robert Redford, he was the founding executive director of the Sundance Institute.
The CINAR scandal was a major accounting scandal in Canada that came to light in March 2000 at CINAR, renamed to Cookie Jar Group, one of the world's most successful children's television production companies at the time. It was exposed when investigators revealed that US$122 million was invested into Bahamian bank accounts without the board members' approval. The scandal resulted in Canada's longest criminal trial ever brought before a jury, lasting from May 2014 to 2016.
The Friend is a novel by American writer Sigrid Nunez published by Riverhead Books in 2018. The book concerns an unnamed novelist who adopts a Great Dane that belonged to a deceased friend and mentor.
Thomas W. Olson is an American children's playwright and lyricist who adapted L. Frank Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage presented by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington.
Myron M. Levoy was an American author of children's and young adults literature. After graduating from Purdue University he worked as a chemical engineer and was involved in the field of space engineering before becoming a full-time author.
Alan and Naomi is a 1977 young adult novel by Myron Levoy. The story takes place in 1944 and is about a friendship which develops between a Jewish New York boy and a refugee child from Nazi-occupied Paris. The book was adapted in 1992 into a movie of the same name.
