In September we celebrated Collective Wisdom’s 1 year anniversary, bringing together the ever-expanding team to reflect on the incredible year we’ve had, alongside some champagne of course!
In just 12 months we’ve grown into a team of 30 professionals, bringing skills and expertise across PR, social media, marketing, profile raising, strategy, publicity, content creation, event management and crisis comms. We’ve delivered standout campaigns, partnered with inspiring clients, and built something truly special together and we can’t wait to see what the next year brings!
It was a busy month for our client Spiracle Audiobooks, with the exclusive release of the audio edition of Tao te Ching, narrated by multi-award-winning actress, Tilda Swinton. The audiobook is central to Spiracle’s 2.0 the Next Chapter fundraise, welcoming in investors to help write the next chapter of the platform, allowing for the expansion of available audiobooks from 2000 to 50,000. Antony Gormley has created a unique print, A Spiral for Spiracle, which will be gifted to the first 300 investors. Gormley’s image graces the cover of the Tao te Ching, which is also available from bookshops as an Audiobook in a Card.
Spiracle is celebrating being awarded an Arts Council England Major Project Grant to support the roll-out of Audiobook in a Card, bolstering their work with independent bookshops across the UK, supplying new tactile products to them while diversifying the discovery of audiobooks and the market itself.
Spiracle was also shortlisted for Audio Business of the Year for the brand-new Speakies Awards, as well as for best narrator for All My Precious Madness. The British Audio Awards, ‘the Speakies’, from The Bookseller and The Stage, is the first UK awards dedicated to excellence in audiobooks and audio drama.
Mid September saw the return of London’s annual Open House Festival celebrating architectural wonders across the city’s 33 boroughs. The Borough of Croydon hosted a wide array of events, tours and behind the scenes look at some of the borough’s most iconic buildings. Alongside securing regional coverage showcasing the range of events and activities, for example this article in the Croydonist, we invited architecture and history influencers to attend talks and tours, with @architecture_anatomy and @thedesignsuite joined a tour with John Grindrod, author and social historian, and @tash_archaeo visiting the Tudor Whitgift Almshouses for a tour and talk.
Croydon kicked off the autumn season with the annual Croydon Harvest featuring The Walnut Fair where the streets of Croydon were brought to life with autumnal fun, filled with live performances, workshops, music, dance, animal encounters and giant puppets. Inspired by the age-old tradition of The Walnut Fair, dating back to 1314, when the people of London would flock to Croydon for a weekend of trade to bring in the Autumn season. Alongside listings in the Londonist and IanVisits and a great picture in the Morning Star, the Croydonist wrote a lovely feature looking at the history of this special event.
In early October, Leila Aboulela received the 2025 English PEN Pinter Prize at a ceremony held at the British Library, where she delivered a powerful lecture, published simultaneously on Wasafiri and PEN Transmissions. Celebrated for her unflinching literary gaze and fierce intellectual clarity, Aboulela was honoured for a body of work that spans six novels, award-winning short stories, and radio plays exploring themes of identity, migration, and cultural heritage. The ceremony also included the announcement of the winner of The PEN Pinter Prize for the Writer of Courage, chosen by Leila herself. This year the prize went to Stella Gaitano, a writer from South Sudan who faced harassment and attacks for her outspoken criticism of the South Sudanese government. She was awarded a fellowship from the PEN Germany Writers-in-Exile programme and relocated to Germany. Her novel Edo’s Souls, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and published by Dedalus Books, was awarded a PEN Translates grant in 2020 – becoming the first novel from South Sudan ever to be published in the UK. Her second novel, Irene was recently announced as part of the inaugural round of PEN Presents x International Booker Prize, a grant programme launched to support translators from the Global Majority with Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom creating sample translations.
