Best Audio Drama: New/Original Work
The winner and shortlist for the Best Audio Drama: New/Original Work category at The British Audio Awards - aka the Speakies - organised by The Bookseller and The Stage
For an original audio drama or multi-cast audio book, written specifically for the format and first published in audio. The Audio Drama categories celebrate the process from text to listener, including the work of the actors and audio production team.
Winner
Restless Dreams
Dan Rebellato
Polly Thomas
Released to mark the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, Dan Rebellato’s Restless Dreams is an appropriately disconcerting audio drama following Max Brod as he smuggles the great writer's work out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on an impossible train.
Dramatically thrilling, surreally funny, historically fascinating and philosophically compelling, it features some fantastic performances – particularly from Anton Lesser as Brod – and its audio landscape is rich and entertaining.
Shortlist
Default Step
Doctor Who: The Stuff of Legend - The Live Show
Robert Valentine
Robert Valentine
Robert Valentine
A live audio adventure created to celebrate 25 years of Doctor Who at Big Finish, blending drama, comedy, and action with live foley, sound effects, and audience participation. Recorded at Cadogan Hall, the show transformed theatrical sound into spectacle — from rubber gloves as disguises to crowds voicing an army of doomed Robomen.
Gershwin & Miss Swift
Andrew McCaldon
Andrew McCaldon
Tracey Neale, Neil Varley
An emotionally rich audio drama about composer Kay Swift, the first woman to score a Broadway hit, and her decade-long love affair with George Gershwin. Blending sweeping jazz-age orchestrations with intimate storytelling, it explores love, creative sacrifice, and the defiance of societal expectations.
The English are Coming
Hattie Naylor
Hattie Naylor
Nicolas Jackson
A contemporary drama set in Cornwall, where a community divided by the housing crisis turns to protest, and then to something darker. As tensions rise and an ancient family secret surfaces, one woman must choose between loyalty to her cause and the haunting legacy of her home.
The Margate Murders
Tom Hofland, Pascal van Hulst, James Dobbyn
Tom Hofland, Pascal van Hulst, James Dobbyn
N/a
A fictional Audible Originals audio drama presented as a true-crime podcast about a serial killer who strikes once a decade and then vanishes. As a journalist investigates, interviews with survivors, witnesses, and experts reveal conflicting accounts and buried secrets, leaving listeners to decide who, if anyone, is telling the truth.
Restless Dreams
Dan Rebellato
Dan Rebellato
Polly Thomas
A surreal, darkly comic thriller set on a train in 1939, following Max Brod as he flees Nazi-occupied Prague with Franz Kafka’s unpublished manuscripts hidden in his suitcase. As his journey descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare filled with philosophers, circus performers, and shifting identities, the drama explores the legacy of literature, cultural ownership, and the blurred lines between nationhood and humanity.
Up in Smoke
Guy Larsen, Cambria Bailey-Jones
Guy Larsen, Cambria Bailey-Jones
Gabriela Jones, Guy Larsen, Cambria Bailey-Jones
Years after a teenage boy mysteriously disappears in a house fire, a disgraced tabloid journalist must expose the other-wordly truth to free a wrongfully convicted man.
