The Corwin Artists' Showcase

Over the years, from early radio to the Internet Age, the winners of the Norman Corwin Award for excellence in audio theater have produced a wide variety of entertainment in sound.  Each calendar quarter NATF features the work of one Corwin Artist for your special listening enjoyment. 

The Norman Corwin Award is named for a prolific producer/director/scriptwriter who created hundreds of audio programs as well a dozen or more film-scripts in his long career.  We could feature an example of Corwin's work every quarter for years to come without repeating a show, and we have dedicated an entire page to his career including a link to On a Note of Triumph, one of his most famous works, as well as to an audio documentary about him produced for National Public Radio, of the same name: On a Note of Triumph, narrated by Charles Kuralt.  But we also want to encourage listeners to go online to You Tube and Old Time Radio Downloads for further examples of his work like The Odyssey of Runyon Jones, or The Plot to Overthrow Christmas. Try it!  Norman Corwin can truly be found everywhere!
 
The Corwin Artists' Showcase
The works of audio art presented here were chosen by the producers of the programs themselves, and National Audio Theatre Festivals is pleased to present them here, without endorsement of the views expressed in them. These works are used here by agreement with the artists who made them, and should not be copied and used by anyone without permission.

​Yuri Rasovsky

​Yuri Rasovsky, aka "El Fiendo" , aka "Yurikins", was a producer, director and writer of radio drama who worked in the United States starting in the late 1960s.  He joined the staff of the Midwest Radio Theater Workshop (MRTW) in its inaugural season (1980). He founded and operated The National Radio Theater of Chicago from 1973 to 1986 and later formed the Hollywood Theater of the Ear (since 1993).  The article on Wikipedia is highly recommended.
 
His big breakthrough was a production of Homer's Odyssey (which he had begun to translate as a child) for which he obtained major funding from TRW in 1980, which won him a first Peabody Award.
 
He went on to produce more great audio drama with more major stars than anyone else for just about every conceivable outlet during the next thirty years, winning every award except the Nobel Prize, but he played the King of Sweden conferring the Nobel in a TV spot, which is pretty damn good in itself.

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He was the author of The Well-Tempered Audio Dramatist's Handbook, published by the National Audio Theatre Festivals in 2006.
 
In the 1990s, he moved into the production of audiobooks along with many other of the second wave of American radio drama producers.  He won a lot more awards doing that, and mainly he made a lot of great recordings.  Many of his radio plays have been published as commercial recordings or as Internet downloads. His new plays are being released by Blackstone Audio.
 
Yuri died in 2012 of esophageal cancer.  The attached photo shows him directing his final opus, "Die, Snow White! Die, damn you!"

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For More Information

Please contactr Charles Potter, Chair, Corwin Award Committee at  cameleopard@earthlink.net  and visit www.hearnowfestival.org