Katie Hims wrote her first play for radio in 1996, and has been writing extensively in the genre ever since, to great acclaim. Katie’s play Waterloo Station was the winner of Best Radio Drama at the 2023 Writers Guild Awards. Her other original audio work includes Black Eyed Girls (winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Original Drama), The Earthquake Girl (winner of the Richard Imerson Award), Lost Property (winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Original Drama) and The Gunshot Wedding (winner of The Writer’s Guild Best Original Radio Drama). Katie has also written multiple adaptations for BBC Radio 4: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls and The Martin Beck Killings by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

Collected here are fifteen full-cast BBC Radio plays Wɾitten ḅy Katie Hims:

Come Closer Now – Annie is writing a radio play about a hundred years of radio plays, and it’s also, curiously, the story of her own family. As she writes she unearths the myths, half-truths and lies that have been woven into her family’s fabric for generations. Stories that are written to cope with uncomfortable facts. Stories that warp and twist reality. Stories stowed in the studio walls. Stories that crackle with electricity. Stories that move across space and time, and end up right in your ear, right in your head. Stories a bit like this one.

Waterloo Station – Two strangers look back on an incident that happened a couple of years ago, just before the world turned upside down. As they do so, they take stock of what’s happened over the last two years.

Black Eyed Girls – Nell finds herself pregnant and marries Barry, not the father, for the sake of respectability. She has twin girls, Jeanie and Meg, and has a blissful first year raising her daughters. But Barry takes an instant dislike to the girls, twin black-eyed girls. They are separated at the age of five, one to stay at home, in a working class family in Scarborough, one to be adopted from a children’s home by an upper middle class academic family. And thus their separate fortunes are set in motion, united only by the vaguest memory of being happy together. Their search for each other continues throughout their lives…

Opening Pandora’s Box – How do you turn a celebrated silent film into an audio drama? Wedekind’s controversial 19th Century Lulu plays formed the basis of the 1929 German movie, Pandora’s Box. Its star, Louise Brooks, will forever be associated with her iconic performance as Lulu, the ultimate ‘femme fatale’. 90 years on, writer Katie Hims wonders what on earth to do about Lulu.

Luxembourg Gardens – For the last five years of her short life, Katherine Mansfield struggled to find a cure for her pulmonary tuberculosis. Very ill, and sometimes hallucinatory, she spends her last day in Paris before resolving to stop writing while she finds a cure. A Mansfieldesque play about Katherine Mansfield.

Scenes from a Zombie Apocalypse – When the world goes off track, sometimes children understand it best. A persuasive modern horror story.

The Earthquake Girl – Edie works in a library and is terrified of causing a world catastrophe. Edie’s sister-in-law, Lila, thinks she should go out and find a man, but she’d rather stay in to write a gothic romance, in fact, Edie would be a library if she could…

Clouds in Trousers – Zoe is a woman growing up weathered – for whom every turn of her life is marked by the weather: rain, snow, a summer heatwave, a thunderstorm, the threat of a flood. All our lives are weather-bound but for Zoe the weather is much more than just what goes on behind the scenes.

Black Dog – Out of the blue, Clare’s husband goes missing leaving her alone with their seven year old son and a huge black dog to look after.

Five Rachels – What if you could replace sad memories with happy ones? What if it was really easy, just as easy as popping a pill? Rachel Ridley is a perfectly ordinary woman who suddenly seems to have discovered memories that she didn’t used to have. She thinks she used to have them, but her doctor is very sure she didn’t.

The Disappearance of Shirley McGill – Shirley has put up with marriage to the overbearing Vernon for 20 years. Her only friend is the butcher, and it’s to the butcher she turns when she discovers that – in spite of plenty of greens and red meat – she becomes at first translucent and then completely invisible.

Poetry in Motion – We hear the thoughts of five people sitting near each other on a train travelling to Manchester. They all get on alone but they all leave a little less so.

Hair of the Dog – A witty and poignant ensemble drama following different characters in the pub on New Years Day. The resolutions aren’t going so well – but what does the year hold for the relationships and the dreams for the future? We move through the bar, between characters and stories, between an old way of life and a new one. Hair of the Dog was recorded ‘as live’, in a single take, on location in a London pub.

Life of Penguins – Merle is a penguin keeper at London Zoo. When her sister Beth fails to make a date at the cinema, she goes searching for her. She soon realises that Beth has been abducted by aliens – and not for the first time.

Lilo – Trystan and Simone haven’t seen each other for eighteen years. They went to school together, grew up together and fell in love. It ended badly and then Trystan went off to university. To Trystan’s disappointment Simone is married to his arch enemy no less. They even have kids. Trystan has no family but a successful career. They both claim to be happy. They both claim to have no regrets. But as the evening progresses they get down to the heart of the matter. Have they wasted the last eighteen years? Should they be together now? And how much did Simone’s act of violence in the swimming pool, as a child, change the shape of both their lives?