Nicola Baldwin
Writer | 2019 Bursary
The bursary supported the development of Nicola’s play about Helen Sharman, an ice cream chemist turned Cold-War Cosmonaut who became the first Briton in space.
Since receiving the bursary…
“The pandemic halted my MGCfutures-funded residency but my bursary allowed me to explore new forms of storytelling and collaboration during lockdown. I streamed a workshop performance of Woman From Mars and developed the site-specific drama Wasteland. I rediscovered filmmaking in Duchess, Revolt! with NHS healthcare scientists; I ran Rise of the Resistance, an award-winning online drama festival around antimicrobial resistance; and our Nosocomial Project staged events at Bloomsbury Festival and Wellcome Trust. For BBC Radio 4, I wrote Madison Chorus (2021) and Camberwell Green (2021), my crime-thriller series about London bus drivers during the pandemic starring Chizzy Akudolu, which was shortlisted for BBC Audio Awards and recently among The Independent’s Top 25 radio dramas. I made audio shorts for One Story Many Voices at Imperial War Museum and wrote the musical Cabaret Havana (2022) for BYMT with composer Tarek Merchant. My sci-fi feature screenplay Black Moss was selected for The Writers Lab UK & Ireland 2022.”
“This year, I was a digital resident on Living With Machines at the Alan Turing Institute using their just-digitised archive of newspaper accident reports to create a verbatim drama from lost voices of the Industrial Revolution, which I’m developing for a site-specific performance. My short film The Nervous State is in pre-production. I’m continuing to write screenplays, including an adaptation of my radio play The Crisis of Wallis Simpson and working towards directing my feature script Black Moss.”
