The Royal Academy of Arts’ collaboration with Pin Drop has been an expansive creative project which began in 2014. Pin Drop, it is fair to say, is a visionary organisation that wants to take literature into places that it hasn’t reached before, and it has been an ongoing pleasure to help them find new contexts for the short story and the spoken word, or rather the beautifully written word spoken aloud with intelligence and feeling.
It is very important for an academy that was founded by artists and architects to remain open to other art forms. The interplay between the visual arts and literature has been an interesting one over the Royal Academy of Arts’ 250-year history. Charles Dickens famously gave the annual speech here in 1853, and Howard Jacobson more recently, and it is a relationship that we keenly continue with Pin Drop.
We have been immensely fortunate that a number of the illustrious writers in this anthology have come to the Royal Academy of Arts and read their work in public. The results have been both symbiotic and poetically resonant in relationship to what has been on display in the main galleries. These include Lionel Shriver during Anselm Kiefer’s monumental solo show, Ben Okri against the backdrop of Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, and Will Self during the landmark Ai Weiwei exhibition.
Extending the relationship between the RA and Pin Drop, Simon Oldfield invited us to partner on the annual Pin Drop Short Story Award. Naturally we agreed, and I have had the privilege of being one of the judges for what has become an important short-story competition. It is appropriate that the award has an open-submission policy, in the context and spirit of the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition. It has achieved many things, notably the exploration and celebration of emerging talent.
A Short Affair is, in short, an illustrated anthology that celebrates the marriage (or at least a passionate coupling) of art and literature. It captures between its pages the rich and fruitful collaboration between Pin Drop and the Royal Academy of Arts. It is especially pleasing that many of the stories in the anthology are drawn from the Pin Drop Short Story Award, and that each of the short stories is illustrated by an artist from the RA Schools. We are incredibly proud of the achievements of the students that come through our art school, which – physically as well as metaphorically – lies at the centre of the establishment, and it is inspiring to see some of these young artists bringing their own developing vision and artistic voice so strikingly into play.
Tim Marlow is the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts.