From the father of fairy tales comes the story of one little fir tree who dared to dream.

Hans Christian Andersen

Known for his many fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen's writing is known for presenting lessons of virtue wrapped up in familiar tales. The creator of such stories as 'Thumbelina', 'The Ugly Duckling' and 'The Princess and the Pea', Andersen's work spanned plays, prose and poetry and have been a well of inspiration for artists ever since. This piece is read by Andrew Whitehead.

Andrew Whitehead

Andrew has worked extensively in theatre throughout his career.  

For Northern Broadsides: Much Ado About Nothing, A Christmas Carol, Cyrano, The War Of The Roses, School For Scandal, The Bells, The Merchant Of Venice, Henry V, A Woman Killed With Kindness, Antigone, Poetry Or Bust, Oedipus, The Cracked Pot, The Merry Wives Of Windsor, King John, Alcestis, Romeo & Juliet, Samson Agonistes, The Passion, Antony And Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Trackers Of Oxyrinchus Canterbury Tales, An August Bank Holiday Lark, She Stoops to Conquer, The Winter’s Tale and The Twelve Tales of Christmas. 

Other theatre credits include: the World Premiere of The Book Thief (Bolton Octagon), Say Yes to Tess (Leeds Playhouse/Camden People’s Theatre), Wind in The Willows, Witches Promise (Birmingham Rep); Dangerous Obsession (Esk Valley Theatre); Sleeping Beauty (Qdos - Beck Theatre); The Wife of Usher’s Well (Quondam Theatre); Rogue Herries, A Chorus of Disapproval, Summer Lightning, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Around The World In 80 Days, Under The Blue Sky, Rebecca (Keswick Theatre By The Lake); Unsung (Liverpool Playhouse), The Glee Club (Library Theatre Manchester); Cinderella (Harrogate Theatre); Richard II (Royal Exchange Manchester); The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (New Vic); Toast and A Christmas Carol (Hull Truck); The Wind In The Willows (Oldham Coliseum); The Grapes Of Wrath (American Drama Group Europe); The Cost Of Living (West Yorkshire Playhouse); Little Sure Shot (West Yorkshire Playhouse/The Egg, Bristol) and (Old Laundry Theatre). 

Andrew's television credits include: Brassic, Emmerdale, Coronation Street and The Big Chance.  

His radio credits include: Stone - ‘Dead Fishes’, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Alcestis, The Cracked Pot (BBC).  As a Musical Director, Andrew wrote and produced the music for the award winning Tongue Twister (24:7 Festival). 

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Between his cat and his lilies, what use does Kamal have for love?!



Kamal Kaan

Kamal Kaan is an actor and writer based near Bradford. Having graduated from The University of Cambridge, he was awarded the Brian Park Scholarship (Shed Productions) to undertake an MA in TV Fiction Writing at Glasgow Caledonian University. 

In 2021, he had two major theatre pieces staged: ‘2010’, one of the Leeds Playhouse major Decades series of monologues, and Aaliyah: After Antigone, a mixed live and streamed theatre play for Freedom Studios in Bradford. 

Kamal is an alumni of the Royal Court Young Writer’s Programme, the Bush Theatre’s Emerging Writers’ programme, was a Writer-in-Residence at Leeds Playhouse and part of BBC Writersroom Drama Room 2017. 

Arian Nik 

Arian is a British-Iranian Actor and a graduate of Mountview Academy.  

Film Credits: Allelujah! (Pathé), The Bower (BFI), The Beekeeper (Miramax), Artemis Fowl (Disney), Dating Amber (Amazon Prime) 

Television Credits: Count Abdulla (ITV), The Bay (ITV), BRUCE (Channel 4) Van Der Valk (ITV), Ackley Bridge (Channel 4), Still So Awkward (CBBC), Killing Eve (BBC) 

Theatre Credits: Kabul Goes Pop: Music Television Afghanistan (Brixton House/Hightide), The Village (Stratford East), The Ugly One (Park Theatre), Pufferfish (The Vaults), The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca (Hull Truck) 

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Love versus love in this story of mothers, daughters, and pomegranates.

Megan Hyland

Megan Hyland is a Manchester-based writer whose writing focuses on surreal, female-focused dark comedy. Having written theatre and entertainment reviews for almost six years for websites such as Upstaged Manchester and Frankly My Dear UK, she decided it was time to put her own words out there. Her new play, Blank Suit, which centres around two competing female assassins that discover they are more interested in each other than they are in the competition at hand; is currently in development and aiming to take to the stage next year. Megan took part in Northern Broadsides's Young Writers' Forge scheme this year.

Lisa Allen

Lisa Allen is an actor based in Hebden Bridge. 

She works regularly for BBC Radio Drama. Her credits this year include The Palace of Varieties and Home Girl (Derby Theatre), Emmerdale (ITV), The Full Monty (Disney Plus), Sister Boniface Mysteries (BBC) and Let Her Go (Make Me Films). She is currently filming the new ITV thriller series Platform 7. 

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Caught in a loveless marriage, will Helen find the strength to leave her husband?

Anne Brontë

The youngest of the Bronte sisters, Anne Bronte's literary career was short-lived. Originally writing under the pen name Acton Bell, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne's second novel. Told through a series of diary entries, the novel follows Helen Graham's abusive marriage to and eventual liberation from Arthur Huntingdon. Writing in 1912, British novellist May Sinclair argued that Brontë's novel 'reverberated throughout Victorian England'. However, Brontë never got to enjoy the success of her novel, dying a year after its initial publication, age 29. The piece is now considered one of the first truly feminist novels in the Western canon.

Sophia Hatfield

Sophia Hatfield is a North-West based Actor-Musician and Theatre-Maker, originally from West Yorkshire. As an actor and musician, Sophia has worked extensively with companies across the UK including New Perspectives, RSC Education, The New Vic, Derby Theatre, Potboiler, Northern Broadsides, M6, Birmingham Rep and Bolton Octagon.

In 2016, Sophia founded Stute Theatre, an award-winning multidisciplinary theatre company, creating touring theatre and live art across the UK. She has since gone on to create and tour theatre all over the UK, specialising in taking inventive live work to library and community spaces. Most recently her work for Stute includes ‘I Am No Bird’ a co-production with the Stephen Joseph Theatre and Brontë Parsonage Museum, ‘Fables at the Kitchen Table’, an inventive show for young audiences and several Telephone Theatre experiences with Stute Theatre & New Perspectives, which reached over 400 people during lockdown.

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Christmas trees, shepherds’ pie and umami lamb collide in this new story from Saima Mir.

Saima Mir

Saima Mir is an award-winning journalist and writer. A mother-of-three, she is the author of The Times bestselling crime novel, 'The Khan'.  

Saima is a guest columnist for The Guardian, and her work has also appeared in the anthologies 'The Best Most Awful Job - 20 Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood' and 'It's Not About the Burqa'. 

You can find her on Twitter: @saimamir 

Mina Anwar

Prolific stage, screen and radio actor, director and singer. TV includes The Thin Blue Line, Sarah Jane Adventures, Doctor Who, In The Club and Happy Valley. Theatre includes original casts of Olivier Award-winning Sheffield Crucible/West End shows Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and most recently Life of Pi. 

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A magical tale of whispered rumours, friendship and a school’s Christmas concert.

Annie Chadwick

Annie is a writer from Skipton in North Yorkshire. After studying Applied Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and then continuing on to an MA in Scriptwriting there, she's keen to write stories with an educational purpose, that have the potential to change minds. This year she took part in the Northern Broadsides Young Writer's Forge, which has enabled her to develop a full-length script. This piece is her first commissioned work. 

Jo Patmore

Jo is an actor, singer and musician who grew up in the East Riding of Yorkshire

Jo trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (graduated 2020) and during her training she was awarded a runner up prize in the 2020 BBC Carleton Hobbs Radio drama competition, and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Music Award for ‘an outstanding musical contribution to the work of the school’.

Credits include: As You Like It (Northern Broadsides/New Vic), Frost Hollow Hall (East Riding Theatre), Queen Mab (Flux Theatre), Rogers and Hart and Hammerstein (BBC Radio 3), Buzzing (BOVTS), Her Naked Skin (BOVTS), and The Snow Queen (BOVTS).

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A story of lace, frills and some handy mice from the creator of Peter Rabbit.

Beatrix Potter

Although born in London, Beatrix Potter made her home in Cumbria. Best known for 'The Tales of Peter Rabbit', Potter wrote over sixty books. Alongside her much-loved stories, she was known as a fierce conservationist and is widely credited with preserving much of the land that now makes up the Lake District National Park. Potter was also a pioneer of merchandising—in 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy, making him the oldest licensed character 

Jessica Baglow

Jessica is a Lancashire-born actor and veteran of Northern Broadsides, having played the role of Phoebe Throssel in Northern Broadsides’s 2020 tour of Quality Street.

Film Credits: Allelujah! (BBC Films/Pathé), The Railway Children Return (Studio Canal), Apostasy (iFeatures), Salvage (Hoax Films Ltd)

Television Credits: Floodlights (Expectation Entertainment), Gentleman Jack (Lookout Point), Silent Witness (BBC), Vera (ITV), Holby City (BBC), Moving On 2: Skies of Glass (LA Productions for BBC), Doctors (BBC), Waterloo Road (Shed Productions)

Theatre Credits, Selected: Macbeth (Leeds Playhouse), Quality Street (Northern Broadsides), Macbeth (Reading Between the Lines), The Big Corner (Bolton Octagon), Hamlet (Bolton Octagon), Jane Eyre (Bolton Octagon)

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Just how far will obsession take you? A tale from Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.

Simon Armitage 

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire. He is the current UK Poet Laureate (2019-2029). He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford 2015-2019. In 2015 he was made CBE for Services to Poetry. Armitage has received numerous awards including one of the first Forward Prizes, an Eric Gregory Award, a major Lannan Award, a Cholmondeley Award, the Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, the Television Society Award for Documentary and the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. He has written three best-selling nonfiction books and writes, records and performs with the band LYR. In 2017 he won the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and was awarded the 2018 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.  

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A Walk Down the Snow Valley

From Calderdale to Pakistan, a winter walk read by Hina Gillani.

Produced by Hallam Breen

Sound Editing by Alex Colley

Music by Katie English

Whether you’re peeling spuds, adding tinsel to the tree or going for a winter walk, do it with Northern Broadsides this Christmas!

From the ocean to Pakistan, from goblins to gravediggers, Northern Broadsides has tales to suit every festive feeling.

So pop on your headphones, or play us loud and proud for the whole family, and enjoy our festive tales, old and new, read in warm and distinctive Northern voices. 

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