In September, PodX announced of a majority share in French podcast production company Nouvelles Écoutes. PodX Group are now becoming the majority shareholders in Goldhawk Productions, a unique production company specializing in audio drama and fiction with a list of catalog of premium IP rights. The company is behind global success formats such as Passenger List, Mumbai Crime, Life After, The Cipher, Tumanbay and Restart. Goldhawk is PodX Group’s first investment in the UK.
Established by multi-award-winning husband-and-wife team John Scott Dryden and Ayesha Menon, Goldhawk Productions has become one of the most distinctive and successful audio fiction production companies in the world. Goldhawk’s overriding mission is great storytelling in sound. The company has made shows all over the world, and extensively in the US and India.
Several of its shows have spin-off novels and been optioned to TV. Goldhawk’s work has won recognition at major festivals around the world including the Webby Awards, New York Festivals, Prix Europa, Writers Guild of Great Britain Awards, Peabody Awards, BBC Audio Drama Awards and the Sony Awards.
Current available fiction podcasts produced by Goldhawk include Passenger List, Mumbai Crime, The Cipher, Life After, Tumanbay, TakeOver, and the recently released thriller Restart, set in the world of video gaming. A new original thriller Young Blood, starring Geoffrey Arend, has just been released by Audible.
John is a writer, director and executive producer. With an impressive track record creating shows for BBC radio, he was hired by Panoply (now Megaphone) in New York as Head of Scripted Content. Before that he had also been Head of Drama for RNZ, New Zealand. John is a recipient of a Peabody Award and has made shows for Audible, PRX/Radiotopia, Wondery, iHeart and the BBC.
He created the fiction podcast Passenger List, a mystery thriller starring Kelly Marie Tran about a plane that disappears mid-flight between London and New York, and the historical fantasy series Tumanbay which ran for four seasons and led to two spin-off novels. His work for the BBC includes the thrillers Severed Threads, A Kidnapping, Pandemic and The Reluctant Spy. He also co-created and executive produces for BBC Sounds the hit YA fiction podcast The Cipher and recently released Restart.
Ayeesha is a writer, creator and producer. Her modern-day adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities won Best Adaptation and her Midnight’s Children won the Outstanding Achievement award at the BBC Audio Drama Awards. She presents the podcast Mumbai Crime, a curated series of audio thrillers from India, released by PRX/Radiotopia. Her credits include the original detective series Undercover Mumbai for the BBC, Jungle Book, TakeOver, and her acclaimed audio adaptations of Vikas Swarup’s best-selling novel Q&A (aka Slumdog Millionaire) and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy both of which won Sony Radio Awards.
Staffan Rosell, CEO and Member of the Board, PodX Group: “Goldhawk Productions is a world class company pioneering in fiction podcasts. They have achieved massive global success with formats such as Passenger List, Tumanbay and Mumbai Crime. We are incredibly proud and happy to partner up with John and Ayeesha.”