Kaitlin Prest Is Done People Pleasing
A Review of Great Love | Gaza Monologues Revisited, the latest from The Heart podcast
For more than fourteen years, Kaitlin Prest, along with a morphing collection of collaborators and “besties” has been pushing audio boundaries with The Heart, a Radiotopia title with an off-and-on affiliation with the CBC, alongside the company she founded in 2019, Mermaid Palace.
By 2017, The Heart had amassed seven million listens; and according to a 2019 profile of Prest in The New Yorker, the show regularly had hundreds of thousands of devoted listeners. These are big numbers for audio, especially in the early days before 2020. This led Nick Quah to conclude in Hot Pod: “If this was the kind of newsletter that peddled in predictions, I would have placed a bet on the idea that 2019 could well be The Year of Kaitlin Prest.” But Quah recanted. In fact, 2019 was a ‘quiet’ year.
In the afterglow of her breakout success with The Heart’s 2017 mini-series No — a searing four-part dive into the murky waters of consent — everything shifted at lightning speed. The series garnered rave reviews. It was re-aired by Radiolab, and set off a cascade of accolades for subsequent work: Peabody nomination, Third Coast Award, Prix Italia, boom, boom, boom. Next, CBC came calling, handing her the reins to a…
