Nigel Benson

Joseph Campbell organist Rachel Swindells has won the $1500 Alan Hewson Memorial Trophy at the New Zealand Association of Organists Congress, in Auckland.

Australian concert pianist Piers Lane has spent most of his life perfecting the concerto he will perform in Dunedin this weekend.

Three Dunedin writers have been named finalists in this year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

New York artist Spencer Finch is searching for the light.

Three southern musicians are finalists in the 2008 New Zealand Country Music Awards.

Burning gods and battling Christians: it's all in a day's work for a Cook Islands artist. Nigel Benson meets Mahiriki Tangaroa.

It has been at the heart of the Dunedin entertainment scene for more than a century. And survived ghosts, bomb scares, drunken bands and even boxing. Nigel Benson has a drink at Sammy's.

Dunedin singers Jonathan Lemalu and Anna Leese have each been awarded a $10,000 grant.

While art is in good heart in Otago, some artists are looking elsewhere.

International violinist Chuanyun Li feigned disappointment when he saw the Dunedin Chinese garden Lan Yuan yesterday.

Lost love and lust stops off in Dunedin this week when A Streetcar Named Desire arrives at the Fortune Theatre.

The Dunedin Midwinter Carnival is back after being iced by a snowstorm last year.

Steev Peyroux is much more than a constructed name. Nigel Benson meets an artist who makes the ordinary extraordinary.

If you have been sleeping a little more soundly than usual lately, there is a very good reason for it.

The art of sculpture takes many forms and directions. For a Franz Josef sculptor it includes preparing her materials by driving over them in a four-wheel-drive.

The bad boy of jazz will be blowing his own trumpet in Dunedin next week. A dark dramatisation of the late jazz great Chet Baker's life, Like Someone in Love, opens in the Fortune Theatre on Tuesday.

Even for an artist, Martin Thompson is a bit different. The former Wellington street character was thrust into the international spotlight three years ago.

Val Webb, of Dunedin, won first prize at the Otago Art Society's 2008 Hope and Sons Art Awards at a ceremony in the Dunedin Railway Station last night.

They say nostalgia is not what it used to be, but two Dunedin musicians who describe themselves as ‘‘ageing rockers'' are hoping to recapture the past.

The April 28, 1869, birth date of Dunedin artist Frances Hodgkins was celebrated in style yesterday when one of her most significant paintings was returned to Dunedin.