Observer/Anthony Burgess prize-winning essay: An Unlikely Arena: New Music at the Last Night of the Proms by Shaun Lyon

A witty and perceptive review of the Proms performance of Mark Simpson's sparks took the £2,000 prize for best arts journalism essay

Should there be an Enid Blyton festival?

Head to head: Anthony Mealing and Gabriel Gbadamosi debate the merits of a planned festival celebrating the controversial children's author

SXSW follows Sundance in rejecting Lindsay Lohan’s The Canyons

Insider at Texas film festival says Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis's erotic thriller has 'an ugliness and a deadness to it'

James Franco to bring American Tabloid to big screen

Adaptation of James Ellroy novel will be next directorial project, Franco tells MTV at Sundance festival. He also plans to star

2013 preview: the cultural year ahead for women

From an Austen anniversary to a Sundance full of female talent, the new year is already packed with highlights, writes Kira Cochrane

Children take centre stage at London’s Imagine festival

Top authors, including Frank Cottrell Boyce, Judith Kerr and David Walliams, will appear at the Imagine festival, which has been programmed by a panel of children

Twitter and literature: unlikely bedfellows?

Twitter's forthcoming 'celebration of storytelling' will severely test a medium that works best for conversation, writes Anna Baddeley

Guest blog: Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is a very modern poster boy

As his staging of Wilde's infamous novel opens at the Abbey as part of the Dublin theatre festival, guest blogger Neil Bartlett comes face to face with the queasy symbiosis of beauty and shame

Dubliners – review

The Corn Exchange's adaptation of Joyce's short stories will encourage new readers but as a piece of theatre it doesn't wholly satisfy, writes Helen Meany

Great Expectations – review

Rarely has Dickens been such flat fare: the meat and humour are gone, replaced by gristle and a damp-pancake Miss Havisham

Midnight’s Children at risk of not being screened in India, says director

No Indian film distributor has bought rights to adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel about India after independence

Dickens’ Women – review

Miriam Margolyes reprises her 1989 one-woman show about Dickens with enormous relish, writes Lyn Gardner

Boxing Day – review

Bernard Rose updates Tolstoy's mysterious tale Master and Man and delivers a shrewd and intimate slow-burner, writes Peter Bradshaw

Venice film festival opens with 9/11 drama The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Director Mira Nair, who lives in New York, hopes American audiences will see it as a film made by people who love the US

Paperback Q&A: Jane Rogers on The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Jane Rogers on her five-year quest and cold determination to unlock the true voice of her 16-year-old heroine