1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Erskine has the goods at Cluster.

2. Critic Mark Mordue has won this year's Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Prize. (Those of you with long memories will recall I was last year's winner; this year I was on the judging panel and can say he was the unanimous choice.) More on Mark's work from James Bradley at City of Tongues. Another blogger/freelance critic: it suggests that the common perception that blogs are the death of criticism might be getting a few critical hits.

3. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux posts details of Howard Barker in conversation on, well, all sorts of things. Go hence.

4. The Guardian flatters me outrageously by listing me as one of five must-read critics, alongside Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Peter Campbell and James Wood. Excuse me while I lie down and recover.

My acceptance speech for the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critical Writing is now online at the Geraldine Pascall Foundation site. The important bit:

But I also see some sparkles in the gloom. There are a lot of smart young bloggers in Australia, hungrily seeing art and responding to it. And artists themselves are vocal in demanding more and better responses to their work. The internet has stepped into the breach. Theatre Notes was the first theatre blog in Australia, but these days it’s by no means the only one. Melbourne in particular has a rich and lively culture of theatre blogging. This prize means a lot to me in many ways, but a major reason is that it demonstrates conclusively that blogging is not just the province of bored teens. And I hope it will encourage not only me, but the talented younger critics I see developing around me. They need encouraging. As we all know, criticism is no easy career choice. It sometimes feels thankless, and it requires the skin of a Sherman tank.

This time it's my turn. I was flabbergasted (but delighted) a couple of weeks ago when a nice man phoned me, told me to sit down and informed me that I'd won the Pascall Prize for excellence in arts journalism, the only award for arts criticism in Australia. The prize is named in honour of the flamboyant journalist Geraldine Pascall, who died tragically young in 1983, when I was half way through my cadetship on the Melbourne Herald and the thought of being a crrritic hadn't entered my head. I wish I had met her. To say I am honoured doesn't really cover it.

I won it for both my reviews for the Australian under arts editors Miriam Cosic and Matthew Westwood, who have been the best editors I've worked for (and whom I now realise were quite brave to employ me), and for my work on this blog. Word of the prize got out yesterday - not from me, as I've been the soul of discretion - and it seems that the news has caused a bit of flurry. The Australian has a story this morning, of course, and there's also a piece in the Age. Odd, as always, to see how I'm seen.

And now I have to catch a plane.