The Last Dinner Party and Salman Rushdie nominated for inaugural Sky Arts Awards
The awards will aim to celebrate the most exciting artists and arts organisations across the UK and Ireland in their first year.
Upcoming rock band The Last Dinner Party and writer Salman Rushdie are among the nominees for the inaugural Sky Arts Awards.
The awards will replace the South Bank Sky Arts Awards and celebrate the “most exciting artists and arts organisations” in the UK and Ireland, in a range of different fields, from music to television.
The award categories are classical music, comedy, dance, film, literature, opera, poetry, popular music, television, theatre, and visual arts.
The Times Breakthrough Award will see rising stars from all of the categories compete.
There will also be the Melvyn Bragg Award, which will be given to an artist who has made a “remarkable contribution” to the arts industry, and the Arts Hero Award, dedicated to celebrating unsung heroes who work behind the scenes.
In the popular music category, The Last Dinner Party have been nominated for their debut album The Prelude To Ecstasy, along with Dave, who has been nominated alongside Central Cee for their track Sprinter.
Sault singer Cleo Sol has been nominated for her entire body of solo work, from debut album Rose In The Dark to fourth LP Gold.
The Last Dinner Party’s nomination comes after they were also shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.
Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is nominated in the literary category, along with Paul Murray for his state-of-the-nation novel The Bee Sting and Claire Kilroy for her portrait of motherhood, Soldier Sailor.
For the television award, BBC documentary Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland is nominated along with BBC true-crime drama The Sixth Commandment and ITV’s dramatisation of the Post Office scandal, Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.
In the film category, All Of Us Strangers, written and directed by Andrew Haigh, is nominated, along with coming-of-age drama How to Have Sex, written and directed by Molly Manning Walker, and feature documentary Occupied City, directed and produced by Sir Steve McQueen.
For the theatre category, venue Soho Place has been nominated as the first purpose-built in-the-round, flexible and fully accessible theatre in London.
It will compete against writer and actor Ryan Calais Cameron, who has been nominated for his entire body of work, and the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff for its acclaimed productions.
Phil Edgar-Jones, director of Sky Arts, said the new awards would be an “unmissable night”.
He said: “This year we’re rallying around the question of why the arts matter, helped by the inimitable Lord Melvyn Bragg, all the artists who appear in our shows, and the expert juries assembled for each awards category.
“Following in the footsteps of the South Bank Sky Arts Awards, the Sky Arts Awards will allow us to celebrate and venerate all the arts in one place, and definitively prove the value of the sector.
“With the cohort of superstar nominees below, it’s going to be an unmissable night.”
In the other categories, sculpture artist Lindsey Mendick has been nominated in the visual arts category for her Sh*tfaced exhibition.
She will compete against Soheila Sokhanvari, who is nominated for Rebel Rebel, celebrating feminist figures from pre-revolutionary Iran, and Sir Steve McQueen has a second nomination for Grenfell.
In poetry, Momtaza Mehri is nominated for her debut collection, Bad Diaspora Poems, along with Karen McCarthy Woolf and Nathalie Teitler for their editing of the Mapping the Future anthology, and Scottish poet Jackie Kay for her most recent collection, May Day.
In comedy, Fern Brady is nominated for her body of work, along with Blindboyboatclub and his popular podcast, The Blindboy Podcast, and Julia Masli for her acclaimed live agony aunt show, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
The dance category sees hip hop company Boy Blue nominated for its body of work.
Clod Ensemble are also nominated for their staging of Charles Mingus’ seminal album The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady and Michael Keegan-Dolan is nominated for his work, How To Be A Dancer In Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons.
The classical music category features Anoushka Shankar, nominated for her second volume of mini albums, Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn, James MacMillan for The Cumnock Tryst and Richard Blackford for his work, Songs Of Nadia Anjuma.
In the opera category, the Welsh National Opera and NoFit State Circus production of Death in Venice has been nominated.
It will compete with the Royal Opera House, which has been nominated for its masterful production of Wozzeck, and the English National Opera for its body of work in a year of critical acclaim.
The nominees for the Times Breakthrough Award are Ben Goldscheider (classical music), Ania Magliano (comedy), Jemima Brown (dance), Savanah Leaf (film), Kaliane Bradley (literature), Aigul Akhmetshina (opera), Ella Frears (poetry), Kneecap (popular music), Adjani Salmon (television), Ben Weatherill (theatre), and Claudette Johnson (visual arts).
Nominees for the Melvin Bragg Award and Arts Hero Award are yet to be announced.
