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The Society of Timid Souls
- Author: Polly Morland
- Category: Non-fiction Other / General
- Publisher: Profile (UK) / Broadway (US)
- Pub date: Spring 2013
- Length: 80,000 words approx
About The Society of Timid Souls
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s 2012 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction
In the New Year of 1942, a pianist from Manhattan by the name of Bernard Gabriel convened the inaugural meeting of an extraordinary new fraternity, which promised to inoculate stage fright sufferers against the terrors that afflicted them. The venture was, during those bitter wartime years, an astonishing success. They called it The Society of Timid Souls.
Seventy years later, just as anxiety has reached pandemic proportions, so courage has become an ideal in crisis, timidity the norm. In this wonderful book, inspired by the brief flowering of New York’s Society of Timid Souls, Polly Morland will set out to conquer some of her own fears and to investigate bravery today. From her background as a journalist and documentary-maker, she will talk to brave people from all over the world, be it the woman who carried out a caesarean section on herself, or the surfer who took on a murderous sea, the man who built a global brand around the courageous ideal, or the freedom fighter who sacrificed a life for it.
From the battlefield to the circus ring, from the mountain peak to the labour ward, from bank robbery to TV talent show, from the eye of a hurricane to the floor of Parliament, Polly’s journey will also draw upon philosophy, literature, propaganda and contemporary popular culture, as she sets out to discover what courage really means and about how a Timid Soul may become a brave one.
About the Author
Prior to working in television, Polly Morland read English at Oxford University where she won a Hodgson Scholarship.
During fifteen years as a documentary-maker, she worked extensively as producer/director for the BBC and for Channel Four, as well as for PBS and the Discovery Channel in the US. The subjects tackled included: the investigation of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia (The Body Hunter, BBC1, 1999), the Duke of Wellington’s love life (Wellington’s Women, C4, 2002), the reclusion of J.D. Salinger (J.D.Salinger Doesn’t Want To Talk, BBC2, 1999), the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 (The 9/11 Conspiracies, C4, 2004), the economics of organised crime (Underworld Rich List, BBC2, 2004), a history of cryptography (The Science of Secrecy, C4, winner of the 2001 Vega Award), the archaeology of ancient Britain (Seven Ages of Britain, C4, 2003), the rise of left wing terror groups in Europe and Latin America (The Age of Terror, Discovery, winner of the 2002 Broadcast Award for Best Multi-Channel Programme) and a controversial history of the Bible (Who Wrote the Bible? C4, 2004). From 2006 to 2009, Polly worked in-house at the BBC as a producer, devising new documentaries for BBC2 and BBC4.