Audiobooks by Michael Symmons Roberts

Utopia: A Full-Cast BBC Radio Dramatisation & more

"Michael Symmons Roberts’ full-cast dramatisation of Thomas More’s classic work, plus an accompanying documentary exploring its legacy Thomas More's classic work of speculative fiction, Utopia, was published over 500 years ago, yet has entered the culture so deeply that the name of his fictional island is still how we refer to our hopes and dreams of a better society. This immersive dramatisation is adapted by the award-winning poet and author Michael Symmons Roberts, and is paired with a documentary programme that further explores More’s iconic book. In Utopia, a full cast brings to life More's strange and enchanting island. More travels to Antwerp, to sort out a dispute in the commercial wool trade. While he is there, he meets an old man who is clearly widely travelled. When More complains about the petty politics of the trade dispute, the stranger says he has seen another way of living. He introduces himself as the adventurer Raphael Hythloday, and describes a thrilling journey exploring an unmapped part of the ocean, discovering an island society unlike any seen before. The island is called ‘Utopia’... Starring Raad Rawi as Raphael Hythloday, Nacho Aldeguer as the young Raphael, and Michael Peavoy as Thomas More. In the accompanying documentary, Utopias, Michael Symmons Roberts examines the book’s intellectual legacy. It generated an idea that has been hotly contested throughout the hundreds of years since its release; a slippery tale that blurs fact and fiction and which has left readers trying to fathom whether More was presenting the island of Utopia as a model society or as a salutary tale. He also eavesdrops on figures from the BBC archives describing what their personal Utopias might look like – including Tony Benn, Jeanette Winterson, Aldous Huxley, Nawal El Saadawi and Iain Banks. Michael Symmons Roberts is an award-winning poet, author and dramatist. His poetry book Corpus won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2007 he received the Arts Council Writers Award. He was elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2012 and in 2014 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has worked with composer James MacMillan for the BBC Proms and won awards for his radio adaptations of His Fearful Symmetry and Soldiers in the Sun. Cast and credits Utopia Written by Thomas More Adapted by Michael Symmons Roberts Directed by Susan Roberts Raphael Hythloday - Raad Rawi Young Raphael - Nacho Aldeguer Thomas More / Achorian - Michael Peavoy Peter Giles - Cameron Blakeley Abraxa - Emily Pithon Barzanes - Jonathan Keeble Macaria - Fiona Clarke First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 24 January 2016 Utopias Presented by Michael Symmons Roberts Produced by Geoff Bird First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 23 January 2016 ©2026 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2026 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd"

Michael Symmons Roberts, Thomas More (Author), Full Cast, Michael Peavoy, Michael Symmons Roberts, Nacho Aldeguer, Raad Rawi (Narrator)

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Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong

"Brought to you by Penguin. A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision. Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find. 'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS 'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss © Michael Symmons Roberts 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025"

Michael Symmons Roberts (Author), Michael Symmons Roberts (Narrator)

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