Arts & Culture

A jubilant Joseph Boyden nabbed the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize on Tuesday night for his second novel "Through Black Spruce," saying he wants his win to inspire native youngsters to pursue their artistic dreams.

One of the leading champions of the construction of a national portrait gallery in Ottawa is applauding the federal government's decision to axe a controversial bidding process that could have shipped the Portrait Gallery of Canada to a western city.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Best-selling U.S. author Michael Crichton, who wrote such novels as "The Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park" and created the popular TV drama "ER," has died unexpectedly of cancer at age 66, his family said on Wednesday.

VATICAN CITY (AFP) — About 40,000 people attended a ceremony Sunday at which Pope Benedict XVI canonised four new saints, among them Sister Alfonsa, an Indian nun who became the country's first woman saint.

TORONTO -- Gil Adamson has won the annual First Novel Award for "The Outlander." The prize is worth C$7,500. Set in the early 1900s, "The Outlander" (House of Anansi Press) tells the story of a woman on the run in Alberta after killing her husband.

Sixteen writers, including Miriam Toews, Rawi Hage and Margaret Visser, are in competition for a total of $155,000 in prize money as part of the annual Writers' Trust of Canada awards honouring excellence in fiction and non-fiction.

RARE behind-the-scenes footage of screen legend Marilyn Monroe failed to reach its estimated auction price after going under the hammer in Melbourne. The two-and-a-half-minute amateur film of the tragic Hollywood actress eventually went for $17,50...

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

For seven years, a Harry Potter fanatic worked on a guidebook to J. K. Rowling’s best-selling series, but in the end, a federal judge ruled on Monday, his book was too close to the work he admired.

CAIRO (AFP) — Muslims around the world this week begin the fasting and feasting month of Ramadan amid hopes of violence easing in some of the Islamic world's conflict hotspots but hit hard by rising food prices.