Since its early years, radio drama has been a versatile medium capable of adapting numerous art forms including literature, plays, and poetry. Although its popularity waned in many countries following the advent of TV, the medium contains to thrive in the UK with the BBC producing hundreds of new plays and comedy programmes every year, some of which have been adapted for TV or cinema. To discuss the opportunities radio drama offers to writers the festival welcomes Alison Hindell (Head of Radio Drama, BBC) and acclaimed radio dramatist Mike Walker.

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Alison Hindell joined the BBC in 1990 as a producer in the Radio Drama Script Unit and became a producer in the Radio Drama Department in Wales in 1990. In March 2005 she was appointed Head of Radio Drama. She has directed approximately 200 radio plays, from soaps to international co-productions, and directed a new version of Under Milk Wood, using Richard Burton’s 1963 reading of First Voice and building a new production around it. She was educated at Mary Datchelor Girls’ School in London and then at Somerville College, Oxford, reading English. Alison is a Fellow of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (FRWCMD), an honour she was awarded in 2006 for services to drama in Wales.

Mike Walker has adapted many books and stories for radio including Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum; Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream; War and Peace (with Marcy Kahan) ; Crime and Punishment; Neil Gaimin’s Anansi Boys; Mario Vargas Llosa’s War of The End of the World; William Gibson’s Neuromancer; Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend and Dombey and Son; Neville Shute’s On the Beach (the most popular BBC Classic Serial of 2009) and No Highway; Len Deighton’s Ipcress File; Science Fiction by Samuel Delany, Lucius Sheperd, John W Cambell and Frederick Pohl; The Officer’s Ward; The League of Gentlemen; Paths of Glory and Kipps.

Mike has written many original radio dramas including plays on Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and J Edgar Hoover. His play on the London terrorist bombings of 7/7 was recently repeated. He is currently adapting (with Jonathan Myerson) Vassily Grossman’s monumental novel about the battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate and is collaborating with crime writer Caroline Graham on a gothic novel set in the 1890s. He teaches Creative Writing at London’s Morley College.