Award Winner in 2023:
Lucy Catherine

Award Committee:

It would go too far to detail Lucy Catherine’s extensive output of films – both fiction and feature – but we’re hardly missing the point by noting a few red threads to the scarier and to the Nordic? Perhaps that’s why her 2019 dramatization of five fairy tales in one unified production under the collective title “Dance till you bleed: The World According to Hans Christian Andersen” is quite strong stuff. Not only because Lucy Catherine has chosen some of Andersen’s more gothic tales, including The Red Shoes and Anne Lisbeth, and coupled them with a couple of very dramatic, but at the same time typically Andersen: The Most Incredible and The Wicked Prince about the meaning of art and human self-assertion respectively. Finally, space has been made for a short but happy version of one of Andersen’s most personal and original tales, The Ice Maiden. None of these tales are among the best known in Denmark, but Lucy Catherine has organised the stories so that they make a very big impression and prove their worth in this particular radio format too.

With Dance till you bleed, Hans Christian Andersen artistically gained new ground.

Lucy Catherine, United Kingdom
for Dance till you bleed: The World According to Hans Christian Andersen, a radio drama for BBC Radio 3