Kate Chisholm

National Poetry Day broke the key rule of poetry readings: never let normal people do the reading

Plus: ‘the breath of lost countries’ filled the airwaves in Radio 3’s Between the Ears and what it’s like to hear Gandalf read your award-winning short story live on Radio 1?

issue 17 October 2015

Imagine what Brennig Davies must have felt like just before 11 o’clock last Tuesday evening. The 15-year-old was about to hear Ian McKellen reading his prizewinning short story nationwide on Radio 1. The voice of Gandalf broadcasting words that have emerged from your own head must have been a spooky moment for Davies, whose story ‘Skinning’ had just won the BBC’s Young Writers’ Award (organised with the Book Trust). This new venture (attached to the BBC National Short Story Award, which was also announced last week, the winner being Jonathan Buckley) in some way makes up for the fact that there is now virtually no programming for children on the BBC’s radio networks; no way for them to learn how to listen, to be drawn in to a world suggested in sound and then created in the imagination.

In Brennig Davies’s story, a young teenager is asked by his Dad to skin a just-killed, still-warm rabbit.

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