Prize

• K-pop group BTS has announced they will boycott the 2027 Grammy Awards in protest of a newly introduced award category. • The controversy centers on the "Best Asian Pop Music performance" prize, which fans argue segregates non-English acts and prevents them from winning general categories. • Academy president Harvey Mason Jr. defended the addition, stating the category was created to provide more opportunities to celebrate diverse and new musical genres.

• K-pop group BTS has decided to boycott the Grammys, announcing they will not submit their album *Arirang* or its songs for the 2027 ceremony. • The boycott follows the Recording Academy's introduction of a new "Asian pop" prize and a "best Latin song" category. • Academy president Harvey Mason Jr. stated the new awards were created to provide more opportunities to celebrate diverse and emerging music genres.

Artist Michael Zavros says he was inspired by a deep respect for Alex Ryvchin’s leadership, as well as an uncanny likeness between the two menAn artist’s portrayal of a Jewish leader produced just weeks after the Bondi massacre has won the Archibald people’s choice category.Michael Zavros won the $5,000 prize for his portrait of Alex Ryvchin, the co-head of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who Zavros called an “unmistakably and unashamedly Jewish” leader.Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

• All seven members of BTS have announced they will boycott the 2027 Grammy Awards via an online statement. • The decision follows the introduction of a new Asian pop prize, which requires nominated songs to feature "meaningful use" of an Asian language. • The move comes amid criticism from K-pop fans who argue the category pigeonholes Asian artists rather than celebrating them on a global scale.

Chair of judges Mary Beard said each of the 13 books in contention for the £50,000 award ‘takes the reader to new places’• Comment: This Booker longlist may have two previous winners, but it’s keen to experimentDouglas Stuart and Marlon James, two previous winners of the Booker, have been named on this year’s longlist, alongside three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout, in a collection that “rewards risk”.The 13 novels selected for the 2026 prize, announced on Tuesday, feature authors of seven nationalities across three continents, with almost half from the UK. Ten of the writers are appearing on a Booker longlist for the first time, including three debut novelists: Kenan Orhan, Rebecca Perry and Djamel White. Continue reading...

• NASA has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to gather input on a potential upcoming prize competition focused on science and innovation. • Interested parties must submit responses to specific topics, with a character limit of 3,000 (approximately 500 words) per response. • This process allows NASA to solicit external expertise and innovative ideas to help the agency explore the unknown in air and space for the benefit of humanity.

• The China Open 2026 badminton tournament is set to begin, featuring a total prize pool of $2,000,000. • Key Indian participants include PV Sindhu, who faces compatriot Unnati Hooda, and Lakshya Sen, who opens against Japan's Yushi Tanaka. • Other notable matchups feature HS Prannoy against Malaysia's Leong Jun Hao and Ayush Shetty competing against Indonesia's Alwi Farhan.

• The DAIHATSU Japan Open 2026, a BWF Super 750 event, has commenced at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium featuring elite global badminton players. • The tournament offers a total prize purse of USD 950,000 and provides critical BWF World Ranking points for the competitors. • Indian star PV Sindhu has made a successful start to the competition, though the Indian campaign faces a setback due to an injury to the duo Satwik-Chirag.

• SentinelOne has developed a cybersecurity platform that is attracting interest from four of the world's largest technology companies. • Cisco is positioned as a primary contender, leveraging a 57.5% year-to-date increase in share price and a strategic restructuring to fund security investments. • While Cisco's security revenue remained flat at $2.01 billion, its networking segment grew by 25%, signaling a push to become critical infrastructure for the AI era.

Punchlines on president’s thwarted bid to have building named after him come thick and fast at Washington DC galaOutside the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a giant tarpaulin remained in place to conceal Donald Trump’s humiliation.Guests entering the national arts complex on Sunday night could not see the section of its marble facade where Trump’s name was recently erased to comply with a court order. Continue reading...

• Reports indicate that Vladimir Putin is losing control over Crimea, as residents are either desperately searching for fuel or fleeing the peninsula. • The instability is highlighted by images showing critical resource shortages and a growing exodus of the local population. • This shift is significant as Crimea remains one of Putin's most prized territorial acquisitions, signaling potential cracks in Russian administrative control.

Jane Allan’s winning Darling portrait prize painting has raised eyebrows after her Doyles art award piece was compared to artist Nicholas HardingAn Australian painter was “clearly influenced” by New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in a major prize-winning work, according to the National Portrait Gallery, after she was accused of winning a separate $20,000 prize with “an imitation” of a Nicholas Harding piece.The National Portrait Gallery has declined to comment further on the marked similarities between a 1982 work by Basquiat, Untitled (Two Heads on Gold), and a work by Lennox Head artist Jane Allan, titled Weight of the Mind’s Periapt. Continue reading...

The Windrush Prize will award £10,000 to the writer of the winning play, which will receive a run at the Arcola theatre next yearThe first prize dedicated to discovering and developing British Caribbean playwrights has been launched using compensation awarded to a Windrush victim who died before receiving it.The Windrush Prize for British Caribbean Playwrights, believed to be the first major prize of its kind in 30 years, has been established by Shereener Browne, the founder and artistic director of Orísun Productions and a former barrister, in memory of her late father, Myron Brown. Continue reading...

Pictures from photographer’s return to Lacock after 40 years were taken months before his death last DecemberThe images are colourful, characterful and thought-provoking. They capture a flower show, a Women’s Institute meeting, a scarecrow festival. A local vicar features, resplendent in a union jack bowler hat, as does a band of bellringers and a bulldog called Billy.Four decades after chronicling life in the picture-postcard English village of Lacock in Wiltshire, the photographer Martin Parr returned to document what had changed – and what had not. Continue reading...

Boseley won for her high-profile, multiplatform political explainer series, Parliamen-Tea: explaining the chaos of Australian politicsGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastGuardian Australia’s Matilda Boseley has taken out one of the top honours at the 2026 Walkley mid-year media prizes, winning the award for innovative storytelling.Boseley won for her high-profile, multiplatform political explainer series, Parliamen-Tea: explaining the chaos of Australian politics, engaging a younger generation in national policy debate. The category recognises journalism that breaks standard structural moulds to reach and inform audiences through dynamic digital platforms and creative production formats. Continue reading...

Awards for prose, children’s writing and poetry, for writers of colour in UK and Ireland, come with £1,000Diana Evans has won this year’s Jhalak prose prize for I Want to Talk to You, a nonfiction collection on subjects ranging from Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison to lockdowns and the British monarchy.The book, described as a “pleasure and an invigoration” by Guardian reviewer Alex Clark, was announced as the 10th winner at a reception on Wednesday evening. Continue reading...

Short story collection All Around the World will be available for £1 in bid to widen access to quality fictionAn initiative that aims to widen access to Booker prize-winning authors is set to launch this week, as research finds that more than a third of UK adults find it hard to read books through to the end.The Booker Prize Foundation is launching a short story collection entitled All Around the World, including works by the Booker prize winners Anne Enright, David Szalay and International Booker prize nominee Nadifa Mohamed. The collection was curated by another former winner, Roddy Doyle. Continue reading...

A renowned academic, Wood was hit by a car as he was crossing a supermarket’s parking lot and later died of the injuriesGordon S Wood, a Pulitzer prize-winning author and historian, was killed on Sunday when he was struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in Rhode Island.Wood, 92, won the Pulitzer in 1993 in the history category for The Radicalisation of the American Revolution, a landmark tome that advanced the theory of the break with Britain being at least as much of an internal social and political transformation as a desire to be rid of colonial masters. Continue reading...

• The Singapore Open 2026, a BWF World Tour Super 750 event, will feature a total prize pool of $1,000,000 (approximately Rs 95.7 crore). • Key competitors include world champions Liu Shengshu and Tan Ning in women's doubles, as well as top-seeded mixed doubles pair Feng Yanzhe and Huang Dongping. • India's Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand have withdrawn from the tournament, leaving Ashwini Bhat K. and Shikha Gautam as the nation's primary representatives.

• The BWF Super 750 Singapore Badminton Open 2026 is scheduled to begin on May 26. • Top Indian athletes, including PV Sindhu, Lakshya Sen, HS Prannoy, and the duo Satwik-Chirag, will compete in the tournament. • This event is significant as these players aim to secure their first titles of the current season.

• Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival for his drama "Fjord," which explores clashing cultures in Norway. • This victory marks the second time Mungiu has received the festival's top prize, highlighting his continued influence in international cinema. • The event also featured a video message from 84-year-old Barbra Streisand, who accepted an award while praising the power of film to unite people.

• Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the prestigious Palme d'Or for his film "Fjord" at the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2026. • The winning film is described as a thought-provoking drama centered on a Christian family living in Norway. • This victory marks the second time Mungiu has received the festival's top prize, cementing his status as a leading figure in international cinema.

• Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novel *Taiwan Travelogue*, translated by Lin King, has won the International Booker Prize, marking the first time a work originally written in Mandarin Chinese has received the honor. • The novel is described as a "double feat" for successfully blending elements of a romance with an incisive postcolonial critique. • Yáng highlighted the work's focus on the complex legacy of the Japanese empire, noting that Taiwanese perspectives on colonial history are often a conflicted mix of nostalgia and distaste.

Jack Clark describes ‘vertiginous sense of progress’ and ‘profound changes’ to society alongside risks of technologyAn AI system will work with humans to make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within 12 months and tradespeople will be helped by bipedal robots in two years, according to the co-founder of Anthropic.Jack Clark described a “vertiginous sense of progress” in the technology and made a series of predictions, including that companies run solely by AIs would be generating millions of dollars in revenue within 18 months, and that by the end of 2028, AI systems would be able to design their own successors. Continue reading...

Garden featuring giant woman carved out of tree makes designer one of few female artists to winFeaturing a giant, slumbering woman carved out of a fallen tree, Sarah Eberle’s hauntingly beautiful Chelsea Flower Show garden has won the top prize.Eberle, now the Royal Horticultural Society’s most decorated gardener, is a rarity; she’s one of only three women to have won Best in Show at Chelsea as solo designers in its 100-year history. Continue reading...

The £20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to Joy Is My Middle Name, a collection about navigating race, addiction and womanhoodA debut poetry collection with themes including race, addiction and womanhood has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace. Continue reading...

All Her Lives is only the fifth short story collection to win the prestigious NZ$65,000 prize in 58 yearsFirst-time fiction writer Ingrid Horrocks has won New Zealand’s richest literary prize for her debut short story collection, All Her Lives.The Wellington-based poet, essayist and memoirist won the prestigious NZ$65,000 (A$53,000, £28,500) Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand book awards on Wednesday night. The book follows nine women across nine different life stages and generations, as they navigate politics, gender and motherhood. Continue reading...

Lai wins $60,000 literary award for her study of a young woman’s repression and rage as she struggles to juggle the needs of those around herSign up for a weekly email featuring our best readsAs the 2026 winner of the Stella prize, Lee Lai has established two new firsts: the first ever non-binary winner with her book Cannon, which is the first graphic novel to win the $60,000 Australian literary award for women and non-binary writers.Cannon follows the titular, queer Chinese woman living in Montreal on the “uncool side of [her] twenties”. Cannon’s real name is Lucy, which became Luce then (loose) Cannon – and much like her unwanted nickname, she shoulders responsibility without complaint. During the day she cares for her gung-gung (maternal grandfather), a former tyrant enfeebled by age, without any help from her emotionally avoidant mother; and by night she works in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant, corralling chaos into order. Cannon’s longtime best friend Trish uses her as a soundboard for all of her problems, and is secretly mining Cannon’s life as a troubling source of inspiration for her writing career. Continue reading...