“The J K Rowling of Slow Literature”
– Calm
My writing sends you to sleep? I hope so, says Phoebe Smith, the world’s best-selling writer of Sleep Stories.
Phoebe Smith sends millions of people across the world to sleep each month. While she’s been one of Calm’s star writers of Sleep Stories since the early days, several years ago she was appointed as Calm’s (and the world’s) first Sleep Storyteller-in-Residence.
Like other such improbable but real, ultra-modern jobs as Ethical hacker, Cloud architect and Emoji translator, Phoebe’s role of Sleep Storyteller-in-Residence is a job for our times – and she’s the perfect person to fill it.
As such her work has been featured in Time magazine, USA Today, on BBC Radio 4 and 5, CNN, LATV, The Guardian, Metro, Evening Standard, MSN, CTV Live, Marketwatch and many more in the UK, USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.
Calm also launched a Sleep Story Collection of her soothing audio tales. Phoebe is the first writer to receive a showcase of this kind.
This new collection includes the world’s single most popular Sleep Story – Blue Gold, narrated by Stephen Fry, the acclaimed British actor and writer, and now listened to by some two million people a month.
To enjoy a free trial of Calm and listen to Phoebe’s - and other’s - Sleep Stories click on the link below. And if you neerd more tips on how to get a good night’s sleep you can listen to Phoebe’s advise with The List.
If you tell Phoebe Smith that her writing sends you to sleep, she replies, “I hope so. That’s the point.”
You’re more likely to disappoint her by saying that you enjoyed the end of her story, since few people get that far. “People say to me, I really enjoy the stories but I never get to the end.”
Sleep Stories require a completely different kind of writing to any writing Phoebe’s ever done. “With most kinds of writing I’m trying to build the tension – but here I’m doing the opposite. Anything exciting needs to go right at the start and then it’s all about winding people down, while also encouraging their imagination to play.”
“When I say that I write Sleep Stories, people are fascinated”, says Smith. “They say, ‘What does that mean? Do you tell stories in your sleep?’
“I answer that I write bedtime stories but for grownups. We all loved bedtime stories when we were kids – and so why did we give them up? Why should we?”
While many of Calm’s most popular Sleep Stories are fiction or fairy tales, with names like A Magical Winter Night, The Seventeenth Princess and The Lost Grimm Fairy-Tale (generated by AI), Phoebe’s speciality is non-fiction and specifically travel stories about the extraordinary places she’s been.
After writing so many stories narrated for Calm by others - including bespoke tales for different celebrities (Stephen Fry, Cillian Murphy, Joanna Lumley, Danai Gurira, Bindi Irwin - to name a few, Phoebe has also made her debut as a Sleep Story narrator. She reads her own Sleep Story, which describes her experience of sleeping wild in Morocco’s Hidden Forest.
“I’ve slept in some pretty extreme places”, she says, adding that she sleeps amazingly well in wild and unlikely settings but sometimes less so in her own bed. “So, I sympathise with the millions who find sleep difficult and am thrilled that my Sleep Stories seem to help.”
Most recently Phoebe has launched her own series on Calm called “Extreme Sleeps” where she takes listeners with her through carefully crafted tales, to experience some of her most intrepid nights out including - sleeping inside a glacier at the last stop before the North Pole, at the foot of Mt Everest, floating on Thailand’s River Kwai, and camping out in the Namibian bush.
She has also turned her soporific penmanship to TV, writing the pilot script for HBO’s World of Calm, which was narrated by Lucy Liu and launched the series. It received a host of stellar reviews including in the New Yorker for its ability to soothe the senses.
Sleep Stories – or bedtime stories for grown-ups – are sleep-inducing audio tales that mix soothing words, music and sound-effects to help adult (and some child) listeners wind down and drift off to sleep.
They also amount by now to a new literary genre. You’ve heard of Slow Food and Slow Travel. Well, Sleep Stories are Slow Literature – half literature, half sleep aid and the world’s fastest-growing new literary form.
If so, then according to Calm’s download firgures, Phoebe Smith is the JK Rowling of Slow Literature.
Calm now offers users a choice of over 300 Sleep Stories, which have been listened to a total of some 150 million times since their launch.