Galina Kiryushina and Pim Verhulst have published a call for papers for a special issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui titled ‘Broadcasting Beckett Across Borders’ which they are planning as guest editors.
Over the past decade, Beckett’s exploration of technological media has attracted much interest, with essay collections such as Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio (2017), Samuel Beckett and Technology (2021) or Beckett and Media (2022), in addition to special issues of SBT/A (‘Beckett and Intermediality’; 32.1, 2020) and JOBS (‘Beckett and Contemporary Aesthetic Form’; 34.1, 2025). To these we can add some new and forthcoming modules in the BDMP – Film and Play/Comédie (2019), the Television Plays (2028) the Radio Plays (2029) – as well as exhibitions like Über Fernsehen, Beckett in Stuttgart (2024–2025). All initiatives that have helped relocate Beckett’s media plays from the margin to the centre of his multilingual oeuvre, they focus almost exclusively on the American (PBS/WNDT), UK and Irish (BBC/RTÉ), French (RTF) or German (SDR/SWR) broadcasting contexts from which his radio and television plays emerged. The goal of this special issue is to go further and investigate how Beckett’s work has been transmitted outside of these well-trodden environments, both during his lifetime and after, until the present day.
Already in 1976, Clas Zilliacus’s pioneering Beckett and Broadcasting – reissued this year by Anthem Press – featured radio and television productions of his work from Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Australia and Japan. Since then, The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (2009) has equally expanded our knowledge about the critical response to his writings across China, New Zealand, Poland, Norway, Spain and Portugal. More recently, then, our attention has been drawn to creative reimaginings and international transculturations, in Samuel Beckett as World Literature (2020) and Translating Samuel Beckett around the World (2021), but also in Beckett’s Afterlives (2023). Nevertheless, these important interventions largely exclude television and radio. To address this oversight, the proposed dossier answers a call from the field of Media Studies for more transnational approaches to broadcasting. Bringing regional frameworks into a dialogue with each other decentralizes national narratives and foregrounds neglected geographical areas such as the Global South and the East, which also aligns with the topic of next year’s Samuel Beckett Society conference in Bordeaux. Finally, as traditional media ecologies evolve due to the internet and streaming platforms, Beckett’s media plays continue to be re-produced and re-translated in new ways.
To better understand this ongoing phenomenon, we are inviting contributions to a special issue of SBT/A on ‘Broadcasting Beckett Across Borders’. Highlighting the less frequently discussed nations of Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, this also encompasses other territories where English, French or German are spoken. Such a wide scope is necessary to explore the fresh perspectives that international broadcasting cultures and traditions bring to Beckett’s television and radio plays, as well as how his works in other genres have been adapted for these media around the world. We therefore encourage contributors to apply insights from a range of different disciplines to topics that could include, but need not be limited to, the following list of suggestions:
- case studies of Beckett’s radio and television plays across the globe
- archival or interview-based profiles of broadcasting stations, networks, etc.
- transmedial adaptations of his poetry, prose and theatre for radio or television
- (re-)translations of the radio and TV plays with attention to medium specificity
- mechanisms of international circulation (e.g., awards, prizes, competitions)
- shifts from traditional broadcasting to online and streaming platforms
In view of broadcasting’s collaborative nature, we are open to co-authored pieces, and, in the spirit of the journal’s bilingualism, articles are welcome in French and English. In some cases, it may be necessary to combine individual countries into larger geographical units. Since researchers will be dependent on the material that is available in archives of state broadcasters and other institutions, it is also possible to just contribute information about radio and television productions to help update the online Beckett on Tape archive (1992) – an effort that will be duly acknowledged in an appendix to the special issue.
Please submit your abstracts (ca. 300 words), with a title and a short bio (ca. 100 words), to p.verhulst@reading.ac.uk before 18 September 2026. If your proposal is accepted, we will send out further details regarding deadlines, journal guidelines, peer review, etc. In case you are willing to take part in a panel or a roundtable discussion on the topic of ‘Broadcasting Beckett South and East’ at the next SBS conference in Bordeaux (9–11 June 2027), make sure to clearly indicate this in your message, so we can add your proposal to the submission pool. For more details about the conference guidelines, see here.
The Samuel Beckett Society 