Actor and award presenter Michael Sheen

The fifth Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough award will once again be decided exclusively by our readers.

Read about the ten nominees below and then vote for the winner of the Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough Award by clicking the link below. Voters are registered and can vote only once.

Voting closes at midnight on Wednesday, January 14. The South Bank Show Awards will be televised on ITV1 on Wednesday, 28th January at 22:35

THE TIMES BREAKTHROUGH NOMINEES 2009

THEATRE: RUPERT GOOLD

At age 36, Rupert Goold is the hottest, most exciting director around. Myself, I've sometimes found him a bit too much the maverick, resisting the revival of Macbeth in 2007 that hugely impressed my colleagues and won several awards, but it was still clear that nobody of his generation could match him for imaginative daring. And his work in 2008 has confirmed that he is potentially, well, a maverick genius.

He so successfully reinvented Pirandello's Seven Characters in Search of an Author, transposing it from the 1920s to the digital era, that a notoriously tricky play moved from Chichester to the West End. He got a wonderfully touching performance from Pete Postlethwaite in and as the King Lear he staged in Liverpool. And he showed that his could respect as well as rework a text when he directed Michael Gambon and David Bradley in a terrific production of Pinter's No Man's Land, again in the West End.

What next? Well, the opening of his revival of Oliver! that's already in previews at Drury Lane should show that Goold's range extends to large-scale musicals. And soon he will become an associate director of the RSC. The future beckons - and positively bulges with promise.
BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

VISUAL ART: RYAN GANDER

Whispers have been blowing through the art world about Ryan Gander for some years. He’s often tipped for future Turner Prize glory, his work is at once engaging and rigorous. This year has been his best yet, with solo exhibitions at Ikon gallery in Birmingham and the South London Gallery, as well as in Bonn, Amsterdam and New York. His Ikon gallery show, Heralded as the New Black, was the one which really brought Gander to public attention. “My dad said it in quite a humorous egocentric way - so after this show in Birmingham, are you going to be heralded as the new black?” Later in the year Gander took part in the Somerset House exhibition Wouldn’t It Be Nice... Gander’s work, which uses any media the artist fancies, has often been compared with storytelling, and his delight in leaving clues for the viewer to follow reflects his love of detective stories. He draws you in, knowing instinctively “how much should be given to the audience and how much should be kept back; how much they need to invest and how many clues I can give without it becoming didactic and easily solveable.” This is one trail that it’s definitely worth following.
NANCY DURRANT

COMEDY: RHOD GILBERT