27 June 2015
Stephen Fry announces Bethan Roberts as winner of the RA & Pin Drop Short Story Award 2015
Stephen Fry, at a special event at the Royal Academy of Arts, narrated Ms. Featherstone and The Beast by Bethan Roberts, the winner of the inaugural RA & Pin Drop Short Story Award. You can listen to Stephen’s narration here.
Stephen Fry commented: “Pin Drop is a wonderfully innovative scheme that unites the written arts with the visual. In iconic venues like the Royal Academy, new and established writers have their works read, discussed and questioned by enthusiastic audiences. The presence of the written word in public spaces filled with visual art reminds writers, whose work is so often private and inward, of the capacity of literature to reach out, uniting it with the family of all the arts where it belongs. I really believe in Pin Drop and felt immensely rewarded to be involved.”
The quality of the entries of this year’s award was high and varied and included a cast of wonderful characters from life models to lion tamers. Returning a shortlist of exceptional quality, the judges selected six stories which each do what a good short story should do: invites us into their world, engages from the first sentence and ends up telling us something about ourselves. In such a competitive field, we needed a truly exceptional winner and our choice was unanimous. Bethan Robert’s evocative story Ms. Featherstone and The Beast, is both tender and poignant. It deals with big themes – love, war and loss of innocence – with a restrained lightness of touch. And, like all the best short stories, its impact lingered and continues to do so.
Bethan’s first novel The Pools was published in 2007 and won a Jerwood/Arvon Young Writers’ Award. Her second novel The Good Plain Cook, published in 2008, was serialized on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was chosen as one of Time Out’s books of the year. My Policeman, the story of a 1950s policeman, his wife, and his male lover, followed in 2012, and was chosen as that year’s City Read for Brighton. Her latest novel is Mother Island. She also writes short fiction (in 2006 she was awarded the Olive Cook short story prize by the Society of Authors), and drama for BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton with her family.
The judging panel included Pin Drop co-founders Simon Oldfield and Elizabeth Day, and the Royal Academy’s Director of Artistic Programmes, Tim Marlow.
26 September 2013
Pin Drop at the London Design Festival
Pin Drop was recently invited by the Crafts Council of Ireland to stage a one-off narration in their fantastic space at Tent London in Brick Lane’s Old Truman Brewery. The exhibition, Vernacular, was being staged as part of London Design Festival and featured the work of over 20 designers including this amazing desk by Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey.
To fit in with the overall theme of the event, Pin Drop asked acclaimed Irish actress Lisa Dwyer Hogg (currently appearing at the National Theatre in Richard Eyre’s Liola – and yes, that is Lisa on the poster) to read a short story by one of Ireland’s foremost contemporary writers, Kevin Barry. Lisa read Atlantic City – a poignant, funny and telling short story that even included the opportunity for Lisa to launch into a pitch-perfect rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday. Lisa narrated while sitting in a particularly comfortable chair designed by O’Driscoll Furniture and upholstered in the finest Donegal tweed.
We had a fantastic night, enjoying free Jamesons whisky cocktails (absolutely lethal ones at that) and welcomed a whole host of new Pin Drop attendees, including the actor Stephen Rea and the designer Paul Costelloe. Thank you to Julia Ravenscroft and Ann Mulrooney and all her team at the Crafts Council of Ireland, our sponsors Audible UK and, most importantly, Lisa herself who was a really brilliant narrator.
28 July 2013
Pin Drop at the Houses of Parliament
On 20 June, we held a Pin Drop narration in the Houses of Parliament, offering our guests an exclusive and intimate look inside these iconic buildings. Our venue for the evening was the Jubilee Room, just off Westminster Hall, which came complete with the most fantastic wallpaper Pin Drop has ever seen.
Our first narrator that evening was the acclaimed young poet Owen Sheers, who read incredibly movingly from his prose poem Pink Mist, informed by the testimonies of soldiers who served in Afghanistan. We then welcomed the actress Lyndsey Marshal (Garrow’s Law, Poirot, The Hours, Rome) who took a break from appearing in Othello at the National Theatre to read the Hercule Poirot mystery, ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’ – complete with a fabulous Belgian accent.
Afterwards, we drank champagne and munched on delicious Propercorn popcorn – all in the shadow of Big Ben. The evening was a huge success and marked the start of our special programme of events sponsored by Audible, the UK’s largest provider of audiobooks. Thank you to the Houses of Parliament for being such generous hosts.