Three winners! Our composers Sarah Nemtsov, Shiori Usui and Liza Lim were all honoured in March for their work.

Liza Lim is the winner of Australia’s Don Banks Music Award for 2018. The Australian composer was “beyond thrilled to receive this award named in [Don Banks’s] honour”. You can read her entire acceptance speech here. On 29 April 2018, Lim’s new work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus is to be premiered at Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. The composition for 12 instruments will be performed by Klangforum Wien under Peter Rundel.




Sarah Nemtsov received the Composition Prize for Contemporary Music from her native city Oldenburg. In the words of its musical advisory board, the members’ judgment was based “not solely on her extensive and diverse oeuvre but also, and especially, on the composer’s development of a highly individual sound”. Her new WERGO album Amplified Imagination was also released in March.




Shiori Usui prevailed against James MacMillan and Martin Suckling at the Scottish Awards for New Music. With her composition from scratch, premiered in 2017 by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, she won in the category “Large scale New Work”. On 4 May 2018, Shiori Usui’s latest work Pya-ryu for solo clarinet and orchestra will have its premiere at the Cottbus Municipal Theatre.