DATO' SITI NURHALIZA

Dato’ Siti Nurhaliza

Dato' or occasionally Datin Sri Siti Nurhaliza binti Tarudin DIMP, JSM, SAP, PMP, AAP born 11 January 1979) is a Malaysian singer, songwriter, record producer, television presenter andbusinesswoman.

Since her debut, she has won a number of international singing competitions. She had been crowned as Voice of Asia in 2002 after winning the Grand Prix Champion title at the Voice of Asia singing competition which was held in Almaty, Kazakhstan. A few years earlier, in 1999 she had won Gold Award in Asia New Singer Competition at Shanghai Asia Music Festival, held in Shanghai, People's Republic of China. Also, in the same year, she had won two awards from 'South Pacific International Song and Singing Competition 1999' held in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

To date, she has garnered more than 200 local awards as well as international awards. She rose to fame as a multiple-platinum selling artist, since her winning of Malaysia's reality show Bintang HMI 1995 when she was only 16 where she was given offers in form of singing contracts from four different international recording companies. Her first single, Jerat Percintaan from her debut album won the 11th Anugerah Juara Lagu and another two awards for Best Performance and Best Ballad. The album itself as of 2005, has been sold to a total of more than 800,000 units in Malaysia alone. In her career she has recorded and sung in multiple languages, including Bahasa Malaysia, Basa Jawa, English, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi and Japanese.

She has won an unprecedented number of music awards in Malaysia and its environs: 34 Anugerah Industri Muzik awards, 23 Anugerah Bintang Popular awards, 23 Anugerah Planet Muzik awards, 18 Anugerah Juara Lagu awards, four MTV Asia Awards and the holder of two records in the Malaysia Book of Records. Backed with 15 studio albums, she is one of the most popular artistes in the Malay Archipelago and Nusantara region and she has been voted for Regional Most Popular Artiste ten times in a row beating other fellow artists from Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore in the Anugerah Planet Muzik since 2001. Currently, she has been listed as one of Malaysia's richest, most-influential, most award-winning, most single-produced artists. She's also one of Malaysia's best selling artists, for in 2000, her album sales alone contributed to 10 percent of Malaysia's total album sales. To date, she has sold more than 4 million in record sales.

In 1998, she was chosen amongst few Malaysian artists to perform during the closing ceremony of 1998 Commonwealth Games in front of Queen Elizabeth II and her consort, Prince Philip among other dignitaries and officials from 70 countries including those from the Commonwealth of Nations. In 2005, she became the first Southeast Asian singer, and third Asian singer to perform a solo concert at the Royal Albert Hall while being backed by the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2005 also, she was listed second byMTV Asia in Asia's Best Musical Artiste and Channel V's Biggest Asian Artiste. In 2008, she was named as one of Asia's Idol by Asia News Network. Her success in the Asian region has gained her honorific titles including "Voice of Asia" and "Asia's Celine Dion".

Source: Wikipedia