All this week we are introducing the 72 Voices writers for 2023 from across the UK and Republic of Ireland.
Meet the second group (the newest addition to the Voices family), the 12 Voices in the South of England hub, which covers the East, South East and South West regions of England.
Development Executive Simon Nelson:
"This brand-new voices group is made up of 12 exciting writers who hail from all parts of the South of England outside London. They have been working with us to master their screenwriting skills as well as learning how to think about what makes great television drama and how to craft vibrant, must-see shows for today’s audience. It’s been my enormous pleasure to spend so much profitable time with such an enthusiastic, talented and chatty (!) bunch of writers. I cannot wait to see what each one will come up with next!!"
If you would like any further details on any of the Voices 23 writers, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Writersroom team: writersroom@bbc.co.uk
You can find out more about Voices and how to gain a place in the group on our Voices page.
Jason Barker is an award winning writer/director, occasional actor and sometimes stand-up comedian based in the West Country.
He is currently developing a feature film called MISTER UTERUS with BFI Film Fund, Delaval Films and Tigerlily Productions, an adaptation of the autobiographical feature documentary he made with the same team in 2018 - A DEAL WITH THE UNIVERSE.
Jason has co-written a radio play for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4 and was selected for the BaftaXBFI Flare mentoring scheme in 2022. Jason’s stories often explore identity, rural mythology and, having been through puberty twice, pregnancy and now menopause (yay), hormonal upheavals usually feature.
Recently completing a neuroscience degree, Lara Biller is relatively new to writing. At university, she wrote several plays that were produced by the drama society, including dark-comedy THE SHADOWS, which had a sold out run at the King’s Arms in Salford, as well as being picked from 200 playscripts for the WordPlay performances at Bath Spa University.
Both her plays THE SHADOWS and FRANKLIN, a drama about gender and mushrooms, were nominated for Best New Writing at the University of Manchester’s theatre awards. During COVID restrictions, Lara wrote 40-minute zoom monologue, iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou, which was put forward as Manchester’s entry for an inter-university drama festival in Edinburgh.
Her work often blurs genres and she is drawn to strange, dark stories with enthusiastic men, queer women and plenty of blood. The first TV script she wrote, about a pack of runaway teenage girls, got her a place on the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Voices scheme.
Rob Cromwell has been a professional writer for TV, live comedy and advertising for nearly two decades.
Having previously focused on comedy, Rob now writes high concept dramas with a satirical or darkly comic edge, around themes of loss and recovery, natural justice, and moral ambiguity. He’s fascinated by the contradictions of the human mind, its darker recesses and the way memory works.
Rob featured on the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s New Talent Hot List in 2017 and has written more than 200 hours of television across the comedy and entertainment genres. His diverse writing CV covers some of the biggest shows and names in British television, and this experience has given him a versatile style without ever losing his unique voice.
Rob’s script RebEllieous – a period comedy drama about a wealthy heiress turned highway robber – was his second foray into drama writing, and he has since written two further pilot scripts. He is currently seeking representation.
Florence Espeut-Nickless is a writer and actor from Chippenham in Wiltshire. She writes for stage and screen about and with working-class communities in the Southwest.
She’s part of Dancing Ledge Productions Screenskills New Talent Scheme 2023/4, an Open Session Writer at Bristol Old Vic, was CRF Writer in Residence at Pentabus, and associate artist at Strike A Light.
Florence adapted THE ODYSSEY for the National Theatre and Trowbridge Town Hall. She’s been commissioned to write a play for NT Connections.
Her award-winning debut play, DESTINY has toured the UK over the last year two years (developed with Bristol Old Vic/Tobacco Factory). She wrote MIRACLE ON 34 SEYMOUR STREET (Trowbridge Town Hall) and is developing a new play BLINDED BY YOUR GRACE (Bristol Old Vic/Strike A Light/GL4/MAYK).
She was a finalist on 4Stories (C4/Blacklight) and shortlisted for Dancing Ledge’s Writer in Residence scheme. Florence is represented by Jessica Cooper at Curtis Brown.
Holly Fitzpatrick forefronts queer feminist rage in all its tragic, comic, epic glory. She is a 23-year-old writer, theatre maker and dramaturg from South Devon interested in transformative, non-linear approaches to storytelling.
After graduating from the University of Exeter with a first class BA in English and Drama, she received Arts Council funding for her debut play, LAVENDER – an intense coming-of-age story traversing gender, faith, politics and time, set along Devon’s eroding coastline. The play was produced at Exeter Phoenix, Theatre Royal Plymouth and the Omnibus Theatre in South London, and as a submission resulted in Holly being shortlisted in the top 1% for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Writersroom’s Drama Room before being selected for the Voices 2023 programme.
Alongside LAVENDER, she has worked as a dramaturg for the queer cabaret-character study Revelations at the Theatro Technis @ 26 Crowndale in Camden, and has facilitated creative writing and performing arts workshops for young people.
Ramsey Hassan is an emerging writer of comics, plays, and novels based in London. As a Somalian who came to the U.K. as an asylum seeker, he’s super interested in telling gripping and funny genre stories about the black Muslim experience and the refugee experience too.
Under his pen name of RAMZEE, he was nominated for a British Comic Award in 2016 and has gone on to write comics for 2000AD and Marvel.
As a playwright, he’s an alumni of the Vaults New Writers Programme and developing a play in the Royal Court Writers Group.
His kids illustrated novella SANCTUARY won the second prize at the Faber Children’s Fab Prize 2017 and he has recently landed a deal to write and illustrate a three book middle grade series.
Pelé Hearne found refuge in imagination from an early age. With a stick in hand, he wielded it as a sword or lightsabre, while a simple blanket transformed into a shapeshifting cape. Pelé Hearne, aged 31 and still a Jedi.
He spent his youth creating films with friends using his trusted handy cam, plunging himself into an education of classic cinema and water cooler moment TV.
Pelé has a passion for writing original expansive worlds, big colourful genre work, and thanks to his background in theatre directing, he is also drawn to writing strong, memorable characters.
His studies in screenwriting and producing at Regents University London earned him recognition, including a workshop opportunity with an Oscar-winning actor.
Notable accolades include being a finalist in the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Studios A Thousand Stories competition 2021 and being awarded "best dialogue" in the 2020 Fresh Voices competition. Pelé, now seeking representation, expects to live up to his namesake.
Paul Holbrook is a multi-award-winning, working-class writer and director. Despite a lack of formal education, Paul began his career making progress through industry-backed screenwriting competitions including Page, Shore, Screencraft and The Academy Nicholl Fellowship.
Paul's work often fuses the flair of genre cinema with grounded social realism, and his passion for character-driven stories is evident in all his produced work thus far. He has screened and won numerous awards at BAFTA, BIFA, and Oscar-qualifying festivals around the world including Palm Springs, BFI London, Encounters, and Aesthetica. He was also nominated for a London Critics Circle Award and has had his work released on prestigious platforms such Short of the Week, Alter and Director’s Notes.
Paul is a returning member of the Bafta Connect program, has been funded by BFI Network and The Pitch Film Fund, and is developing various TV and film projects including a 6-part TV comedy with Sky.
Laura Horton is a multi-award-winning writer and the first playwright Laureate of Plymouth.
Her debut play LABYRINTH DIET was an OFFCOMM winner in 2021. Her follow-up BREATHLESS was awarded the Pleasance Regional Partnership. It won a Fringe First, was a finalist for the Popcorn Award and was shortlisted for other prestigious prizes. The show enjoyed runs at Soho Theatre and 59e59 Off-Broadway in 2023, where it was New York Times critic’s pick. She has written several short plays. Her first short film, A SUMMER OF BIRDS, was Toast of the Fringe winner in 2021.
An associate of The Space, Laura launched digital projects HIDDEN BY THINGS and THEATRE STORIES, for which she was in The Stage100. On commission at Theatre Royal Plymouth, she is also developing dark comedy, LIFE UNDERWATER, which has been selected for a reading at the Criterion.
She is adapting LIFE UNDERWATER and BREATHLESS for television. Laura also runs Bad Sex Writing workshops and shows. She is represented by United Agents.
Harry Smyth is a writer & development producer with one foot in scripted drama and the other in documentary.
Harry has developed an impressive list of unscripted programming for major broadcasters such as Â鶹ԼÅÄ, Channel 4 and Sky. The latest series he developed, ‘STACEY DOOLEY: STALKERS’ for Â鶹ԼÅÄ, was met with critical acclaim and excellent viewing figures. Harry’s unscripted development work accounts for over 50 hours of broadcast content.
Harry's crime-drama script COLDLINE made the 2018 Official LondonTVPitchbox Selection at Raindance Film Festival and was later in development at BAFTA-nominated Salon Pictures. His following script UNTIL PROVEN made the 2021 Pitchbox Official Selection. Though mainly writing in the crime & thriller genres, his work as a screenwriter also includes a web-series for Comedy Central and narrative music videos.
More recently, Harry has worked on funded developments for HBO, Tall Story and NRK. Harry is represented by The Dench Arnold Agency.
Courtney Wilkinson is a Mexican-American screenwriter from California living in Henley-on-Thames. She moved to England after finishing her undergraduate degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies at the University of Cambridge.
In addition to writing for television, Courtney is a music journalist and interviewer, covering everything from indie shows to large festivals across the US and Europe.
Having been drawn to UK television from a young age, her inspirations have primarily been British from The Inbetweeners to Black Mirror, the latter having inspired HARMONY, her dystopian sci-fi television series about women’s bodily autonomy.
Rowing has also been a large part of her life, having been a coxswain at Berkeley and Cambridge. She is currently working with a US production company to develop her first television series, PUTNEY TO MORTLAKE, a dramatic comedy based on the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race.
Mo Yilmaz
Though career-wise in nappies, the hope is to bring something to the table which reflects what we all need now, which is a renewed faith in the common goodness in people. This process reflects this; my colleagues in new voices from across the country are fellow travellers, trying to make a connection with you, the audience. The rest is details. Having said that, some details: British born, South East Asian extraction, father, husband, son.