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Artist News Awards Media
George The Poet’s podcast wins Peabody Award
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 11 June 2020
George The Poet’s podcast – ‘Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’ – has been announced as one of the winners of this year’s Peabody Awards. They being the awards that recognise compelling and empowering storytelling in broadcast and digital media.
The first podcast made outside the US to win a Peabody, the judging panel said: “George Mpanga’s ‘Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’ is a remarkable and arresting creative engagement with European colonialism and the Black Atlantic consciousness its afterlife produced”.
“Through the portals of poetry, spoken word, music and speculative fiction”, it went on, “Mpanga, or George The Poet, imagines new horizons of possibility and pushes the boundaries of language and wordplay to explore issues of trauma, intimacy, work, art and creativity, belonging, attachment, and meaning in Black Atlantic worlds”.
George The Poet adds: “To win a Peabody feels like being honoured by storytelling royalty. Our podcast was inspired by greats from different fields who have also been honoured here; it’s a milestone in my career that I never dreamed of reaching so soon. On behalf of my community, I’m grateful for this recognition of our truth”.
As the Peabody panel noted, the podcast uses a mixture of artforms, with theatre, documentary and sound design also in there. Those artforms are used to tell stories about black British life, making it particularly relevant to this moment in time. Not only that, it is also a simply amazing programme, finding amazingly innovative and compelling ways to tell stories that are frequently astounding.
The first two series of the podcast are available from BBC Sounds (in its own app and anywhere else you might go searching for podcasts). A third is set to follow later this year.
