1 TV drama: Malachi Kirby 
Already acclaimed for his stage acting, Malachi Kirby this year made his international screen breakthrough. The 27-year-old Londoner, whose grandparents were Jamaican, took the role of Kunta Kinte in the History Channel’s $50 million mini-series Roots, based on Alex Haley’s investigation of his family’s origins in Africa. The former athlete, who had a recurring role in EastEnders, showed extraordinary commitment to playing Kinte, refusing to eat while filming in the hold of the slave ship and taking himself to the point of breakdown in the Louisiana plantation whipping scene. He cried halt, he said, only when he could no longer hear his own screams. Also last year Kirby starred as a soldier in the first Netflix run of Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi satire series, Black Mirror. This piece also examined mankind’s ability to desensitise itself to the pain of those it casts as the Other. We have witnessed the making of a serious young talent.
Andrew Billen

2 Dance: Vidya Patel 
She leapt to national attention in 2015 as one of the finalists in the BBC Young Dancer competition and followed that with a stunning performance as Princess Maria in Richard Alston’s An Italian in Madrid, which has just finished a UK tour. In that role the kathak-trained Vidya Patel, 21, proved to be a dancer of incredible beauty and grace, not to mention dazzling speed. I was bowled over by her versatility, her fluid rhythmic agility and her strongly expressive presence on stage. This year she is continuing her collaboration with Connor Scott (who won the BBC competition two years ago) and has plans “to dance in another exciting project in the pipeline, which hasn’t been announced yet, but will take me through to next autumn”. Although she works freelance, after her experience as a guest artist with Alston’s troupe (which led to two nominations in the Critics’ Circle national dance awards), Patel would love to join a company — and she would be an asset.
Debra Craine

3 Film: Lewis MacDougall 
Aged 13, Lewis MacDougall starred opposite Felicity Jones last year in A Monster Calls. If anything he upstaged her, with a performance of pent-up emotion and bravery that did proper justice to this adaptation of Patrick Ness’s book about a boy whose imagination implodes when his mother is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Edinburgh schoolboy’s performance did not go unnoticed; after a young performer of the year award for A Monster Calls from the London Film Critics’ Circle, he has been snapped up for two new productions — and learnt two new accents. In Boundaries, due out in the next year, he plays Vera Farmiga’s son in a road-trip movie as they drive a weed-smoking grandpa (Christopher Plummer) to California. And MacDougall, now 14, will soon play a rebellious teenager in The Belly of the Whale in Ireland with Michael Smiley. More, no doubt, to follow.
Kate Muir

4 Opera: Natalya Romaniw
Her name sounds Russian and her repertoire embraces some of the core Russian roles, including the talismanic role of Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, for which Natalya Romaniw won huge plaudits at Garsington last year. Yet the 30-year-old was born and bred in Wales, and owes her name to a Ukrainian grandfather. Light, lyric sopranos are a dime a dozen on these shores. Romaniw breaks the mould. Having paced herself wisely in her twenties, she is ready to unleash her big, rich voice on larger stages. After christening Grange Park Opera’s new opera house in Surrey this summer, when she will sing Jenufa, she will reprise Tatyana at Welsh National Opera in the autumn and Scottish Opera next year. Verdi roles are surely round the corner. Could this be the biggest voice to come out of Wales since Shirley Bassey? The omens are more than good.
Neil Fisher

5 Rock/pop: Sampha
Sampha Sisay has been lending his smooth tones to records by Jessie Ware, Kanye West and Drake for the past seven years, but it was on this year’s Processthat he came into his own. On the 28-year-old south Londoner’s debut album, electronic soul takes various unusual forms — Timmy’s Prayer must be the first R&B jam to feature bagpipes — while serving as a vehicle for Sampha’s conflicting feelings about family. (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano recalls the solace he found in childhood by learning the instrument his father bought to get the kids away from the television. What Shouldn’t I Be? finds the singer bemoaning “family ties, pulling around my neck”, a sentiment made more complex by the fact that both his parents are dead. A sophisticated approach to experimentation makes Sampha’s music impressive, but it is his sensitivity and willingness to use painful or revelatory moments as the starting point for self-expression that give it weight.
Will Hodgkinson

Joseph Knox, Kate O’Flynn, Kieran Hodgson, Rachel Kneebone and Sheku Kanneh-Mason

6 Literature: Joseph Knox
“It is difficult to believe that Sirens is Joseph Knox’s first novel, so assured is his writing and his command of the subject. He jumps straight into the top league of English noir.” This was the verdict of Marcel Berlins, crime reviewer of The Times for more than three decades, when he reviewed this debut in the spring. Sirens follows a junior detective searching for the daughter of an MP — a runaway teenager who becomes embroiled in Manchester’s drug scene. Aidan Waits, the detective, is a bit of a bad boy too, dabbling in various urban spices. This is his first outing in what is intended to be a series — it is hoped the next one will be an easier birth. It took Knox eight years of writing, rewriting and worrying before he was ready to hand in his manuscript. Little wonder there was a certain anxiety — in his day job, Knox is the crime buyer for the Waterstones bookshop chain. Knox, 30, got a glimpse of the city’s underbelly when he studied at the University of Manchester and, as Val McDermid says, “Sirens is a powerhouse of noir. Joseph Knox owns Manchester and paints it in all its grimy colours.”
Robbie Millen

7 Theatre: Kate O’Flynn
In some ways it was hard to imagine Kate O’Flynn in the role of Laura, the damaged and delicate young girl in The Glass Menagerie who is forever at the mercy of her overbearing mother. This may be because we last saw her as the vile (but hilariously so) kick-ass boss in Bridget Jones’s Baby and, really, you cannot imagine two more different characters. However, it was her appearance in John Tiffany’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s play that made this her year. O’Flynn makes the role of Laura her own: she blossoms before our eyes as the much-heralded “gentleman caller” pays attention to her, transforming from an awkward wallflower to a young girl who can almost believe that her life could change. O’Flynn, who was born in Bury, received rave reviews when the play was seen briefly in Edinburgh last year and during its West End transfer. Her nomination for the Olivier best supporting actress award (she lost out to Noma Dumezweni of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child fame) underlined that this was one of the performances of the year.
Ann Treneman

8 Comedy: Kieran Hodgson
Each year at the Edinburgh Fringe, dozens — no, hundreds — of comedians put on shows about their interesting pasts. Some of them are even worth sitting through. Yet last summer none of them could match what Kieran Hodgson pulled off in Maestro. It was a one-man show about being precociously talented: Hodgson played his young self as a prissy Yorkshire kid with a thing for Mahler. It was an hour about love and accepting yourself: he played his naive young self and his unsuitable romantic partners, role-swapping with casual virtuosity. It was an hour that got him shortlisted for an Edinburgh Comedy award. And it proved that this 29-year-old could make a personal story as funny as it is resonant. If you can’t see Maestro on tour (to July 11), listen to Earworms, his new show about classical music, on Radio 4 in August. “I’m trying to take the wide-eyed enthusiasm for the subject that I had in Maestro,” he tells us, “and use it for good on a national scale.”
Dominic Maxwell

9 Visual art: Rachel Kneebone
Ceramics have come a long way since those primary-school days of lumpy coil pots. At the heart of their uberfashionable revival is the sculptor Rachel Kneebone, who, on top of having a show in the V&A’s medieval galleries, is Glyndebourne’s artist in residence this summer. Kneebone’s orgiastic confections, squirming and twining, writhing and convulsing, set the imagination seething. They combine the ostentatiously decorative with the sexually daring, the repulsive with the poetic, the pleasurable with a deeper sense of unease. Ideas meet, melt and fuse in these bone-white confections. The baroque meets surrealism. Fragile, brittle porcelain speaks of the supple pliability of soft flesh. This is an artist who, treading the borderlands where conscious and subconscious blur, creates pieces that reflect the flow of our perceptions and capture a sense of our minds in imaginative flux.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston

10 Classical: Sheku Kanneh-Mason
Still a schoolboy, Sheku Kanneh-Mason caused a sensation last year when his performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto won the BBC Young Musician competition. The first black winner in the competition’s 38-year history, he is the product not of a hothouse specialist music school, but of a state comprehensive in Nottingham. He has six siblings, all of them with outstanding musical gifts. The 18-year-old cellist has gone on to dazzle audiences at the Royal Festival Hall and elsewhere with his virtuosity and the maturity of his interpretations, and has been specially showcased by Chineke!, Britain’s first orchestra for black and minority ethnic musicians. It’s too early to load him with expectations — he starts a three-year undergraduate course at the Royal Academy of Music this autumn — yet the experts are already predicting an international career. What’s more, he seems happy to be a role model for non-white children venturing into classical music. “I hope that will be the case,” he says.