Zara Symes at the Athena Film Festival in New York earlier this month.

Zara Symes’ ‘A to Z’ given new life after being included on the Athena List in New York

When Australian-Scottish screenwriter Zara Symes worked at London’s ITV News in the early 2010s, a story about the names of the city’s Crossrail tunnelling machines caught her eye.

While christening one of them Elizabeth was easy enough to understand, giving another the title of Phyllis seemed slightly more obscure.

After some initial research, Symes discovered the tunnel was named after Phyllis Pearsall, founder of Geographers’...