Come to Grief shortlisted for 2015 BBC Audio Award

Delighted that my radio play Come to Grief has been shortlisted for ‘Best Drama’ (Adaptation category) in the 2015 BBC Audio Awards. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote that ‘nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it’. However, as much as writey folk (writers, critics, Creative Writing tutors) emphasise the importance of creating a sense of place, unless we are writing travel journalism, place is above all a metaphor, no? The action of my radio play occurs in the ‘real’ world and in a peculiar aural landscape alternately representative of memory and fantasy. My aim was to conflate the physical and emotional space my protagonist inhabits and blur the boundaries between these spaces. Similarly, my novel Alarm Girl is set in South Africa but above all it is the foreign-ness of Africa for my young narrator that is important. Hopefully the heat, the unfamiliar landscape and the encounters with strangers resonate as a metaphor for her emotional state. Come to Grief was first aired on BBC Radio 4 in July 2014 and will be repeated on the 25th February 2015.