Curators and artists say this is a time of overdue recognition but others are cautious about the longevity of the moment

At last year’s Venice Biennale, the pavilions were packed with indigenous art from around the world.

Artists from the Tupinambá community in Brazil sat alongside work by the late Rosa Elena Curruchich , who made pieces about Indigenous women in Guatemala. The Amazonian artist Aycoobo was celebrated, as were carvings by the Māori artist Fred Graham . The eventual winner of the Golden Lion – the event’s highest accolade – was the Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore .

Milton Court, London
Anchored by drumbeats, the Soul soared skywards in James MacMillan’s timeless choral allegory, exquisitely sung

J ames MacMillan ’s Ordo Virtutum (“The Order of the Virtues”), for two eight-part choirs and percussion, was written during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns for the MDR Rundfunk Choir, who gave the first performance in Leipzig last year. This was its UK premiere by the BBC Singers and National Youth Voices under Sofi Jeannin.

A work of unwavering spiritual certainty lasting just over an hour, it derives from the allegorical morality play of the same name by Hildegard of Bingen, dating from about 1150, in which personifications of the Christian virtues (Humility, Faith, Chastity, Hope, and so on) wage war with the devil for the human Soul, which is assailed by temptation yet all the while conscious of its longing to return to the God who created it.

Coliseum, London
Thea Musgrave’s 1977 account of the persecuted queen has been reimagined in terms of 20th century sectarianism in Stewart Laing’s production. It is sung and acted with blazing conviction by English National Opera

The final new production of English National Opera ’s season is Thea Musgrave ’s Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Stewart Laing and conducted by Joana Carneiro. It was last heard in London at Sadler’s Wells during a 1980 tour by Scottish Opera, who premiered it in Edinburgh in 1977.

It’s a bleak, uncompromising piece, in many ways. Musgrave is having none of the still prevalent Romantic view of Mary as the passionate martyr of Fotheringhay, focusing instead on her years in Scotland between 1561 and her abdication in 1567, and probing her relationships with the three men who jostled to control her: her illegitimate half-brother James, a fierce Protestant, whose fixation with his sister, it is implied, may have been incestuous; Henry Darnley, her profligate second husband; and Bothwell, the Catholic mercenary, whose ostensible loyalty masks a tendency to coercion and sexual violence.

Exclusive: Christ Church college taken aback to receive hundreds of the author’s letters, photos and rare items

Thousands of letters, photographs, illustrations and books from one of the world’s largest private Lewis Carroll collections have been donated to the UK out of the blue by an American philanthropist.

The extraordinary gift has been made to Christ Church, University of Oxford, where Carroll lectured and where he met Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which celebrates its 160th anniversary this year.

In the Yorkshire author’s first memoir, she recounts in tender, sometimes showy prose her difficult relationship with her complex mother and brushes with danger in her thrill-seeking years

Adelle Stripe is the author of one novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017), one work of nonfiction, Ten Thousand Apologies (2022) – a biography of the wilfully dysfunctional band Fat White Family – and various short stories in sundry collections. Now the North Yorkshire writer has trained her focus inward with a coming-of-age memoir that recounts the story of growing up with a complex mother and how she herself became a “reckless daughter”. Authors who turn to memoir face certain dilemmas. They must wrestle with precisely how much to reveal and what to conceal; which are the most resonant parts and how to avoid self-indulgence. The best in the genre manage such issues with invisible aplomb, while others can seem like leafing through family photo albums whose pictures mean more to the subject than to anyone else.

The fact that Stripe has elected to write hers in the second person is jarring. Second person can work effectively in fiction, but memoir is all about intimacy, disclosure. “Come in,” she seems to be saying here, “but stay over there . No, further back.”

Base Notes: The Scents of a Life by Adelle Stripe is published by White Rabbit (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Two stranded cousins scrap for a better life – whatever the cost – in Mahdi Fleifel’s powerful feature

Cousins Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) don’t have the luxury of morality. Undocumented Palestinian refugees living hand to mouth in Athens, they subsist on what they can scrape from petty crimes. Chatila has a plan – to save enough to reach Germany, where they will open a cafe. Reda, meanwhile, has a drug habit. Clean for a month, his addiction continues to get in the way of his view of the future. Clinging to his smarter, stronger cousin, Reda asks again to hear about the cafe, like a kid pleading for a bedtime story. When a scheme to make money backfires, Chatila snatches opportunity from the jaws of disappointment and comes up with a plan to earn enough to escape Athens. But it’s a plan that comes with a considerable cost, both to the desperate victims Chatila plans to target and to the cousins, who have to live with themselves afterwards.

Mahdi Fleifel’s taut thriller, which plays out predominantly in Arabic and English, has something of the ragged outlaw urgency of Midnight Cowboy . The hard-scrabble gutter existence is vividly captured by a restless, questioning camera, but we learn the most from Bakri’s superb performance, as he wrestles with guilt over what he has become.

In UK and Irish cinemas

Join us for all the action from the Southbank Centre (and BBC One), as Conclave locks horns with Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist battles Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown

Fancy some further reading? You can find out more about the recipient of this year’s special award for outstanding British contribution to cinema here – they’re a brilliant outfit which builds cinemas in hospitals. Whet your appetite further with titbits about this year’s menu , and study the full list of nominations, plus news on those nods and Peter Bradshaw’s take .

Speaking of Peter, his official predictions are here , Andrew’s here , and mine are below. Please note these are non-legally binding.

The actor recalls a terrifying moment when playing the doomed Egyptian queen during a 1987 production of the Shakespeare classic

Wriggly creatures have always scared Judi Dench. “I’m a person who is frightened of a worm because one jumped inside my sandal when I was a little girl, and we couldn’t get it out,” she said.

So after being cast in the 1987 National Theatre production of Antony and Cleopatra , Dench was terrified when director Peter Hall said there would be live snakes on stage.

In this candid extract from her new memoir, actor Tuppence Middleton describes her lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and asks for those with the condition to be treated with more sympathy

My mind is full of scorpions. Devious, nimble little beasts that have occupied my head for the best part of 30 years. A cerebral itch, impossible to scratch. They wield their own special power over my brain, shaping the architecture and rhythm of my thoughts. An immovable nest, weighing heavy in my skull. I know these creatures well, but they know me better. I am their dutiful puppet, stuck inside an endless loop of sleepless nights and watchful days.

They answer to another name, this nest of scorpions, the writhing black mass that lives inside my head: obsessive-compulsive disorder.