The red carpet rolled out before the Hyatt Regency ballroom last month filled with some of the world's top podcasting talent as the Third Coast International Audio Festival celebrated its 2019 Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition awards.
Called “the Oscars of Radio,” the annual awards ceremony recognizes the best non-fiction audio stories on radio, podcasts, and the internet.
Sayre Quevedo took home this year’s gold award for “The Return” from NPR’s Latino USA. The audio documentary tells the story of poet Javier Zamora, who returns to his grandparents’ home in El Salvador to find the reality at odds with his childhood recollections.
“This is Not a Drill,” a story of the false missile alert that threw Hawaii into emotional turmoil last year, took the silver, and “A Sense of Quietness,” a UK entry that explored the unexpected consequences of talking about abortion, was awarded the bronze.
The Driehaus Foundation has supported the competition since 2000.
Best Documentary: Gold — "The Return" by Sayre Quevedo
Best Documentary: Silver — "This Is Not A Drill" by Jazmín Aguilera, Anna Sussman, John Fecile, Erika Lantz, Eliza Smith and Nancy López
Best Documentary: Bronze — "A Sense of Quietness" by Eleanor McDowall
Best Documentary: Honorable Mention — "ROW-cub" by Neena Pathak
Best Documentary: Foreign Language — "Price of Secrecy: Hazineh Razdari" by Zoha Zokaei
Best New Artist — "Mardi Gras is a State of Mind" by Mara Lazer
Best News Feature — "Death in Illinois Prisons: He Didn't Have a Death Sentence, But That's What He Got" by Shannon Heffernan
Best Serialized Story — "In the Dark: Season Two" by Madeleine Baran, Samara Freemark, Natalie Jablonski, Rehman Tungekar, Parker Yesko, Will Craft and Catherine Winter
Skylarking — "Punks" by Kathy Tu, Tobin Low and Matt Collette
Radio Impact — "Change Intolerance" by Garth Mullins, Sam Fenn, Lisa Hale, Alexander B. Kim and Ryan McNeil
Director's Choice — "No Feeling Is Final" by Honor Eastly, Joel Werner, Alice Moldovan, Graham Panther, Russell Stapleton and Kellie Riordan
