Siobhán McHugh is an award-winning podcast producer, critic, consultant and academic. Her recent book, The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound (UNSW Press 2022), hailed by a peer reviewer as ‘invaluable… the first comprehensive book on storytelling podcasts’, is a critique of podcasting as a new medium and growing industry, as well as a practical guide to making compelling narrative podcasts. A Columbia University Press edition is due late 2022.
Siobhán was consulting producer on Phoebe’s Fall, Wrong Skin, The Last Voyage of The Pong Su, investigative journalism podcasts that all won gold at the New York Radio Festivals, and on The Greatest Menace, a queer history podcast dubbed ‘Australia’s S-Town’, currently shortlisted (2022) for three NYF awards. Siobhán founded RadioDoc Review, the first journal of critical analysis of audio stories. She is also podcast critic at large for the Sydney Morning Herald.
In 2022, she founded the Hub for Innovation in Podcasting, a coalition of podcast researchers, creators, fans and industry, who will pool ideas and resources to develop podcasting as an art form, extension of journalism and new medium. She is Honorary Associate Professor at University of Wollongong (Journalism) and the University of Sydney (Media/Communications). Twitter @mchughsiobhan Siobhan is giving an online masterclass on making narrative podcasts at the Sydney Writers Festival 15 May.