Vernor Steffen Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the originator of the technological singularity concept and perhaps the first to present a fictional "cyberspace". He has won the Hugo Award for his novels and novellas A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), Rainbows End (2006), Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002), and The Cookie Monster (2004).
György Kurtág is an award-winning Hungarian classical composer and pianist. He was an academic teacher of piano at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 1967, later also of chamber music, and taught until 1993.
Eiichiro Oda is a Japanese manga artist, who is best known for his manga series One Piece (1997–present). With more than 450 million tankobon copies in circulation worldwide, One Piece is the best-selling manga and the best-selling comic series of all time, making Oda one of the best-selling fiction authors. The series' popularity resulted in Oda being named one of the manga artists that changed the history of manga.
Louise Elisabeth Glück is an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. She won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2014 for Faithful and Virtuous Night.
John Wood is a Gold Logie Award-winning Australian actor and scriptwriter, best known for his roles as Stipendiary Magistrate Michael Rafferty in the legal drama Rafferty's Rules and as Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon in the long running police drama Blue Heelers, both for the Seven Network.
Conjunctions, is a biannual American literary journal based at Bard College. It was founded in 1981 and is currently edited by Bradford Morrow. Morrow received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 2007.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
The BP Portrait Award is an annual portraiture competition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. It is the successor to the John Player Portrait Award. It is the most important portrait prize in the world, and is reputedly one of the most prestigious competitions in contemporary art. The Daily Mail has called it "the portraiture Oscars".
San Francisco International Film Festival is among the longest running film festivals in the Americas. Organized by the San Francisco Film Society, the International is held each spring for two weeks, presenting around 200 films from over 50 countries annually. The Festival highlights current trends in international film and video production with an emphasis on work that has not yet secured U.S. distribution. Since its inception, the International has grown to serve over 70,000 patrons, with screenings held in San Francisco and Berkeley.
The O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize was awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrated great imagination and daring. The poet must have published at least one book within the last five years, must have made important contributions as a teacher, and must be committed to furthering the understanding of poetry.
Harold Holzer is a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the American Civil War Era. He won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and four other awards in 2015 for his book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press. Holzer served for nine years as co-chairman of the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), appointed to the commission by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and elected co-chair by his fellow commissioners. In June 2010, he was elected chairman of the ALBC's successor organization, The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, which he led through 2016. In his professional career, Holzer serves as the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. He retired in 2015 as Senior Vice President for Public Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where for 23 years he was chief spokesman and held responsibility for government relations, admissions, visitor services, and multicultural audience development at the nation's largest art institution. He is now a Trustee of The Metropolitan Museum, representing the New York City Comptroller. From 2012 to 2015, Holzer served as well as a Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society. In 2016-17 he served as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. He was also a script consultant to the Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln, and wrote the official young readers' companion book to the movie.
Makinti Napanangka was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia's Western Desert region. She was referred to posthumously as Kumentje. The term Kumentje was used instead of her personal name as it is customary among many indigenous communities not to refer to the deceased by their original given name for some time after their death. She lived in the communities of Haasts Bluff, Papunya, and later at Kintore, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north-east of the Lake MacDonald region where she was born, on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art is the modern art work produced by indigenous Australians. It is generally regarded as beginning in 1971 with a painting movement that started at Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, involving artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and facilitated by white Australian teacher and art worker Geoffrey Bardon. The movement spawned widespread interest across rural and remote Aboriginal Australia in creating art, while contemporary indigenous art of a different nature also emerged in urban centres; together they have become central to Australian art. Indigenous art centres have fostered the emergence of the contemporary art movement, and as of 2010 were estimated to represent over 5000 artists, mostly in Australia's north and west.
The Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize is an award given by the Royal Academy of Music in London. It is sponsored by the Kohn Foundation, and given to performers and scholars who have made an outstanding contribution to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
The Angoulême International Comics Festival is the second largest comics festival in Europe after the Lucca Comics & Games in Italy, and the third biggest in the world after Lucca Comics & Games and the Comiket of Japan. It has occurred every year since 1974 in Angoulême, France, in January.
Ian Cumberland is an Irish visual artist. He was born in Banbridge, Co. Down, 1983. His work focuses on portraits with his paintings typically using oils as the primary media. He studied fine art at the University of Ulster. He has won several prizes, the most significant of which was the Davy Portrait Award in 2010.
Jack Clemenger (1899–1964) was an Australian tennis player. He began his career in New South Wales and then moved to Victoria. In business he rose to the rank of general sales manager at Allied motors in Australia. While studying at Sydney University, Clemenger played baseball, billiards, cricket and rugby, but it was at tennis he most excelled. He had a good all round game and was better at doubles than singles. Clemenger made his debut at the 1919 Australasian championships and lost in round three to James Anderson. At the 1922 championships, Clemenger lost in the quarter finals to Norman Peach. In 1924 he lost in round one to Garton Hone. In 1930 he lost in the quarter finals to Harry Hopman. At Wimbledon in 1932, Clemenger lost in five sets in round three to Paul Féret. At the 1933 Australian championships, Clemenger lost in round two to Keith Gledhill. At the 1935 Australian championships, Clemenger beat Jacques Brugnon before losing to Giorgio de Stefani in round three. In 1939 he lost in round one to Colin Long. Clemenger was an Australian Davis Cup captain and selector. He started Clemenger Advertising in 1946 and was awarded the OBE.
