Evgeny Shtorn's new story for RTÉ Radio 1's Spoken Stories is voiced by Dmitry Vinokurov - listen to Nessun Dorma above.
As hard-won personal liberty for the narrator is finally achieved, a global pandemic is undermining his precious new-found freedom to be himself...
The 12 writers of this Spoken Stories collection took as their starting point the theme Creatures of the Earth, the title of a short story and of a short story collection by Irish writer John McGahern.
On being one of the invited writers of this series, Evgeny Shtorn says "Spoken Stories has been an absolutely unique opportunity for me as it came in the exact moment of life when we were all enclosed in our houses observing the great unknown. So, both the wonderful short stories of John McGahern and the work itself on my own humble contribution became a salvation".
"Is there anything better than to escape to a reality that is as vivid, funny, wise and deep as the one of McGahern and to use it as inspiration for your own creativity? It is also important to emphasise that working on a short story inspired by another short story creates inevitable, and very often, invisible links that exist only for me and the author. It is the first time for me working on a project like this, and I definitely would go for it again because it was really inspirational".
Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth, Sundays at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1 or wherever you get your podcasts - listen to more from Spoken Stories here.
