麻豆约拍

Three short stories on the theme of sleep and rest specially commissioned for Radio 4.

Spinkej by young British writer Clare Wigfall: An exhausted mother contemplates her sleeping newborn baby in a clinic in Czechoslovakia in 1945. Ludmila, a young girl falls unwittingly pregnant after a brief relationship with a German soldier. She is sent to a mother and baby unit where she is kept until the baby is born. In her naivety, she is totally unprepared for motherhood, but as she watches the sleeping child a bond begins to form. It is a bond that the staff at the clinic and her mother do not wish to support. When Ludmila, now exhausted, herself falls sleeps what will happen?

Clare Wigfall is a young British writer living in Prague and Berlin. Her first collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing was published by Faber and Faber in 2007 to critical acclaim.

The reader is Sian Thomas and the producer is Julian Wilkinson.