LONDON (AP) — Scottish artist Nnena Kalu has been awarded the Turner Prize for work that includes vivid abstract drawings and hanging sculptures, the first artist with a learning disability to win Britain’s most famous visual art award.
Kalu, 59, who has autism, received the 25,000-pound ($33,000) prize on Tuesday evening at a ceremony in Bradford, northern England.
Her winning works included a series of brightly colored cocoonlike shapes made of wrapped materials that hung amid the concrete pillars of a disused power station in Barcelona.
The judging panel led by Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson praised the “powerful presence” of her “bold and compelling” work.
Kalu, who has limited verbal communication, is a resident artist at ActionSpace’s studio, which supports learning disabled artists in London.
Charlotte Hollinshead of ActionSpace said Kalu had "made history.”
“This is a major, major moment for a lot of people. It’s seismic. It’s broken a very stubborn glass ceiling,” Hollinshead said onstage at the award ceremony in Bradford, the U.K.’s 2025 city of culture.
Kalu beat three other artists — Rene Matic, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa — to the prize, which was founded in 1984 and named for 19th-century landscape painter J.M.W. Turner.
Established to promote young British artists, and now open to U.K. artists of any age, the prize helped make stars of shark-pickling artist Damien Hirst, potter Grayson Perry, sculptor Anish Kapoor and filmmaker Steve McQueen.
But it has also been criticized for rewarding impenetrable conceptual work and often sparks debate about the value of modern art. Winners such as Hirst’s “Mother and Child Divided,” which consists of two cows, bisected and preserved in formaldehyde, and Martin Creed’s “Lights On and Off” -- a room with a light blinking on and off -– have drawn scorn from sections of the media.
Nnena Kalu, second from right, is announced as the winner of the Turner Prize 2025 at a ceremony at Bradford Grammar School, in Bradford, England, Tuesday Dec. 9, 2025. (James Speakman/PA via AP)
Nnena Kalu, right, is announced as the winner of the Turner Prize 2025 at a ceremony at Bradford Grammar School, in Bradford, England, Tuesday Dec. 9, 2025. (James Speakman/PA via AP)
ROME (AP) — Italian food is known and loved around the world for its fresh ingredients and palate-pleasing tastes, but on Wednesday, the U.N.'s cultural agency gave foodies another reason to celebrate their pizza, pasta and tiramisu by listing Italian cooking as part of the world’s “intangible” cultural heritage.
UNESCO added the rituals surrounding Italian food preparation and consumption to its list of the world’s traditional practices and expressions. It's a designation celebrated alongside the more well-known UNESCO list of world heritage sites, on which Italy is well represented with locations like the Rome's Colosseum and the ancient city of Pompeii.
The citation didn’t mention specific dishes, recipes or regional specialties, but highlighted the cultural importance Italians place on the rituals of cooking and eating: the Sunday family lunch, the tradition of grandmothers teaching grandchildren how to fold tortellini dough just so, even the act of coming together to share a meal.
“Cooking is a gesture of love, a way in which we tell something about ourselves to others and how we take care of others,” said Pier Luigi Petrillo, a member of the Italian UNESCO campaign and professor of comparative law at Rome’s La Sapienza University.
“This tradition of being at the table, of stopping for a while at lunch, a bit longer at dinner, and even longer for big occasions, it’s not very common around the world,” he said.
Premier Giorgia Meloni celebrated the designation, which she said honored Italians and their national identity.
“Because for us Italians, cuisine is not just food or a collection of recipes. It is much more: it is culture, tradition, work, wealth,” she said in a statement.
It’s by no means the first time a country’s cuisine has been recognized as a cultural expression: In 2010, UNESCO listed the “gastrnomic meal of the French” as part of the world’s intangible heritage, highlighting the French custom of celebrating important moments with food.
Other national cuisines and cultural practices surrounding them have also been added in recent years: the “cider culture” of Spain’s Asturian region, the Ceebu Jen culinary tradition of Senegal, the traditional way of making cheese in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
UNESCO meets every year to consider adding new cultural practices or expressions onto its lists of so-called “intangible heritage.” There are three types: One is a representative list, another is a list of practices that are in “urgent” need of safeguarding and the third is a list of good safeguarding practices.
This year, the committee meeting in New Delhi considered 53 nominations for the representative list, which already had 788 items. Other nominees included the Swiss yodelling, the handloom weaving technique used to make Bangladesh’s Tangail sarees, and Chile’s family circuses.
In its submission, Italy emphasized the “sustainability and biocultural diversity” of its food. Its campaign noted how Italy’s simple cuisine valued seasonality, fresh produce and limiting waste, while its variety highlighted its regional culinary differences and influences from migrants and others.
“For me, Italian cuisine is the best, top of the range. Number one. Nothing comes close,” said Francesco Lenzi, a pasta maker at Rome’s Osteria da Fortunata restaurant, near the Piazza Navona. “There are people who say ‘No, spaghetti comes from China.’ Okay, fine, but here we have turned noodles into a global phenomenon. Today, wherever you go in the world, everyone knows the word spaghetti. Everyone knows pizza.”
Lenzi credited his passion to his grandmother, the “queen of this big house by the sea” in Camogli, a small village on the Ligurian coast where he grew up. “I remember that on Sundays she would make ravioli with a rolling pin.”
“This stayed with me for many years,” he said in the restaurant's kitchen.
Mirella Pozzoli, a tourist visiting Rome’s Pantheon from the Lombardy region in northern Italy, said the mere act of dining together was special to Italians:
“Sitting at the table with family or friends is something that we Italians cherish and care about deeply. It’s a tradition of conviviality that you won’t find anywhere else in the world.”
Italy already has 13 other cultural items on the UNESCO intangible list, including Sicilian puppet theatre, Cremona’s violin craftsmanship and the practice moving of livestock along seasonal migratory routes known as transhumance.
Italy appeared in two previous food-related listings: a 2013 citation for the “Mediterranean diet” that included Italy and half a dozen other countries, and the 2017 recognition of Naples’ pizza makers.
Petrillo, the Italian campaign member, said after 2017, the number of accredited schools to train Neapolitan pizza makers increased by more than 400%.
“After the UNESCO recognition, there were significant economic effects, both on tourism and and the sales of products and on education and training,” he said.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
FILE -Eugenio Iorio bakes a pizza at a restaurant in Naples, Italy, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)
