Festival & Award · 2026-06-30
Australian wins the English-language BBC audio drama prize
Australia's Finegan Kruckemeyer has won the native-English category of the BBC World Service international audio drama competition with his play “Here, on a High Hill”; the winners were announced on 1 June in London. The competition drew more than 800 entries from 87 countries.
Finegan Kruckemeyer was born in 1981 in Cork, Ireland, to a German father and an Irish mother. He moved with his family to Adelaide at the age of eight, then to Tasmania in his mid-twenties to write full-time. He is one of the most prolific writers of theatre for young audiences: more than a hundred of his plays have been staged on six continents, in eight languages. His work has won numerous honours, including the 2011 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, the 2012 Helpmann Award and seven AWGIE Awards. His winning audio play, “Here, on a High Hill,” follows four teenagers reflecting on life in a graveyard in south-west Ireland.
The winner of the other category, English as a second language, is Nigeria's Idi Nasiru. His play “Aisha's Horizon” is about a young refugee woman whose family is killed and who sets out from a refugee camp on the dangerous journey towards Europe.
The competition's full name is the BBC World Service International Audio Drama Competition; its partner is the British Council. The BBC World Service is the BBC's international, English-language news and broadcasting arm, reaching hundreds of millions of people worldwide every week across radio, digital and television. The winners receive prize money, and their plays are produced by the BBC as studio recordings and broadcast by the BBC World Service. In this way the writers reach a global audience.
Sources: FilmInk · Podnews · Melbourne Theatre Company
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