CANBERRA’S autumn is “enlightened” by, literally, burning money.

The “Enlighten” festival’s debut is reported to have lost $2.4 million of taxpayer’s money, while Tourism Minister Andrew Barr tells “CityNews” that they expect to expand the festival next year.

Following the Facebook-savvy Barr, Simon Corbell takes to Twitter. The Minister for Emergency Services is tweeting, up close and personal, to show people what he does day-to-day aside from the “three-second grab” on the news.

For writers, personal stories really count, or even amount to a tribute to a long past. O’Connor consultant Toryn Chapman was inspired by a letter his mother found, to his grandmother in a Sydney orphanage from her own grandmother in England, and started writing what became a book, “The Grey Cat”.

Another local writer Elisabeth Rose set Aranda to be the romantic centre of the national capital in her new novel, which has been shortlisted for the Romantic Book of the Year Award by the Romance Writers of Australia. Canberra must be flattered, to have anything to do with romance.

If you travel all the way from horror camps, Canberra can be a true relief. Freyla Ferguson talks to Shin Thu Gay on World Refugee Day, who fled a refugee camp and now calls Canberra her home.

The move to Canberra was extremely difficult for Joshua Gordon, suffering from Autistic Spectrum Disorder, until he found his love for skating. Now he is the new star on ice.