Dr Kim Wiltshire is a scriptwriter and fiction writer, with much of her creative work being political, issue-based or exploring health and well-being. Plays include: Polarised (2004 – Burnley Youth Theatre), about the 2001 race riots (later adapted as a film for schools); The Loser (2009) for Scenepool at Camden People’s Theatre; Sing When You’re Winning (2010) for Bolton Octagon; Joy With Child (2010) for Organised Chaos in Manchester (shortlisted for the 2009 Bruntwood Prize); Triple The Price Of Fruitcake as part of the Come Closer event at the Royal Exchange (2015). Short films include Living To Die for Let's Go Global/Mothers Against Violence and Transitions for Lime and the CF Unit. In 2014, supported by Bolton Octagon and Arts Council England, with Paul Hine she toured Project XXX, a multimedia play, and in Autumn 2017, The Value of Nothing, directed by Joyce Branagh, toured the North West and the Midlands. Both plays have been published by Aurora Metro.
In December 2015 her book, Writing For Theatre: Creative and Critical Approaches, was published by Palgrave Macmillan (now with Bloomsbury Academic) and in September 2018 the book she co-edited and co-wrote with Billy Cowan, Scenes from the Revolution, was published by Pluto Press. She has also had various academic articles, essays and short stories published.
In 2022 she became a British Academy Innovation Fellow, working with the arts team of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), known as Lime, to explore ways of embedding the arts into healthcare settings.
About NHS Verbatim Poems, by Kim Wiltshire and Caro C
NHS Verbatim Poems is one of the projects that came out of the British Academy Fellowship. Working with musician and sound artist Caro C, Kim interviewed a range of nurses both onsite at Manchester Royal Infirmary and across the city with the District Nurses. Using a range of questions, Kim and Caro formed the interviews into ‘poems’ using the clips from the recorded interviews, with Caro adding original music to these pieces often using found sounds from the working environment. At time of writing, there are three poems with a fourth planned for 2024. The poems can be found here.
One Day, One Ward was showcased on the BBC Arts and Idea podcast (BBC Radio 3 - Arts & Ideas, New Thinking: Writing the NHS) and two of the poems formed part of an immersive dance theatre piece of the 2023 Being Human Festival in Liverpool, Be My Guest, working with Fusion Dance Company.
The reason we wanted to use verbatim for the poems was because of the truthfulness of what was said in the interviews. As the writer, Kim shaped the words and sentences, formed them into a poem, but the phrases, statements, ideas are those that came from the nurses and healthcare staff we interviewed. Their words can paint a picture of what life is really like as a frontline healthcare worker so clearly, including not only the difficulties of their working life, but their homelives, giving a rounded picture of a whole human being who just happens to do an amazing job, rather than the faceless heroes/angels that the public were encouraged to bang pans for on their doorsteps every Thursday evening during the pandemic. These poems were created to honour and show appreciation for that work.
Below is the transcript of One day, One Ward.
