Bafta-winning TV playwright Neil McKay specialises in dramatising stories about real lives and has used ghastly true events at Feltham Young Offenders Institution as the core of this harrowing work. Robert Stewart is a damaged, violent young man who should have been contained in a secure psychiatric unit rather than a state prison. A catalogue of grave mistakes in Stewart's treatment is meticulously unfurled before our ears until we reach the brutal and horribly predictable end to his long record of violence and racist behaviour. Both tragic and shaming, this raises some very serious issues. Jane Anderson Radio Times Choice
Features Matthew McNulty & Ross Boatman

Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph 4 May 2010 says: 'And So Say All of Us (Radio 3, Sunday) was a comedy about a general election when no one turned up to vote, everyone having been too busy thinking about themselves. One couple started by ripping out the kitchen they once loved and ended with their whole house demolished, looking at the sky, feeling connected again. Another couple were expecting a baby but the mother didn’t want to give birth. On radio and TV the world was being constantly reported but to no effect. “It’s sad because I know it’s sad,” said one character. “I don’t feel anything.” Written by Dan Rebellato, Linda McLean and Duncan Macmillan, crisply directed by Polly Thomas for independents CrossLab, it was almost too true to be good.'

AMAZONIA is the story of Arthur Ransome’s dramatic sojourn in Russia, years before he found fame as a children’s writer with Swallows and Amazons. Reporting for the Daily News from the Russian Front during the First World War, Ransome found himself swept up in the extraordinary events of the Bolshevik Revolution. Useful to both sides, he began a dangerous double life as journalist and agent for the Bolsheviks and M15. War, revolution, espionage and love feature in a biographical portrait of a man more commonly associated with childhood adventure fantasies and English holiday idylls.

Joe Hughes, Rory Kinnear

directed and produced by Melanie Harris TX March 2009 BBC Radio 3 based on the book The Man Who Went Into the West by Byron Rogers

Gillian Reynolds Telegraph 24 March 2009:
On Sunday night I switched to Radio 3 to hear Alone Together, a play about the poet RS Thomas, by Neil McKay. Thomas was a poet, an Anglican priest who chose Welsh parishes, whose wife Elsi sacrificed her career as a painter for love of him, whose son in this piece is searching for the truth of what kept his parents together. Thomas was a flinty romantic, wanting passionately to be Welsh, speak Welsh, call things by Welsh names. Yet he’d learned the language only in his twenties, couldn’t quite master it in conversation, took his son out of Welsh schools to send him to an English boarding school. The play, as any good play does, made you catch several things at once. Here was Thomas’s verse, sharp as slate, there his banked down inner fires alongside an inability to see any point of view but his own. Jonathan Pryce was magnificent in the part. Kate Fahy gave Elsi bright youth, shading gradually into age and resignation. Ian Puleston-Davies was Gwydion, their son, questing like his father, loving as his mother. Melanie Harris, the director, cast it exactly, each voice an instrument in a trio. In 90 minutes this little company conjured from air a whole surprising, shifting, shining world.

Ian Puleston-Davies & Jonathan Pryce in the Macclesfield hills

the wire strand BBC Radio 3 TX February 2009: scripted, directed & produced by Melanie Harris with Bonnie Engstrom, Ashley Gerlach, Charles Swift, Caitlin Thorburn, Colin Warner & music by Leafcutter John

Elisabeth Mahoney The Guardian, Monday 16 February 2009
"Nina Black (Saturday) was a frenetic, restless docu-drama in the always-rewarding The Wire slot on Radio 3. Melanie Harris, writing and directing, came up with a multilayered approach to the subject of living with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and shaped her writing accordingly. "We do things so quick and so fast," explained the real Nina Black, whose observations ran alongside the drama, "in the same moment as we think." Bonnie Engstrom played the fictional Nina, and gave a performance that ranged from goofily awkward, via maddeningly intense, to pitifully vulnerable. The indifference of others ("Oh for God's sake, nutters reunited," is a train guard's assessment of her behaviour) and the desperation of some (the real-life mother's words) formed a tremendously affecting backdrop to the portrayal of the condition, as did Harris's quietly brilliant writing."

"I finally had time to really sit with and listen to Nina Black, and have to say - I loved it. It does such wonderful job, through the blend of reality and drama, of helping you begin to understand Nina's life, her person, how it must be to move through her world. There were moments when I actually wasn't sure which side of that fiction/documentary divide I was on...which was perfectly appropriate, and made for a listening experience that was unique, and effectively transportive."
Julie Shapiro, Artistic Director – Third Coast Festival, Chicago

GIFTED is a story about 15 year old Rumi, a talented mathematician with a place at Oxford whose real battle is to escape her family. Both tragic and comic, GIFTED is a coming of age story seen through the lens of immigration, race, maths and sex. The radio serial won a Mental Health Media Award, and the book won the Desmond Elliot Prize 2008, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007 and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2007.

Sagar Arya, Sadia Ghaffar, Nina Wadia