The MPG (Music Producers Guild) has revealed that recording artist, songwriter, producer and Grammy Award winning recording engineer, Imogen Heap will be the recipient of the 2018 MPG Inspiration Award.

The prestigious honour is awarded to a recording professional who the MPG Awards board of directors deems ‘responsible for a body of work that has significantly inspired others’. Previous recipients have included Nile Rodgers, Roni Size, Damon Albarn, Glyn Johns and Sylvia Massy.

Heap’s many achievements include numerous internationally successful albums as a solo recording artist, the composition of songs and original score for feature films, music for the west-end play Harry Potter And The Cursed Child and a coveted Ivor Novello Award for song-writing. She is also the only female artist to have won a Grammy for engineering.

Speaking to PSNEurope about her MPG Inspiration Award, Heap said: “Inspiration is at the core of every project. It often changes lives. It’s what can pull you through a rough patch and give you that extra energy you need to get on with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Thank you kindly to the MPG for this award. To have a nod from those who represent and stand up for those in the music production world, means a lot to me.”

In recent years, Heap designed and produced Mi-Mu musical gloves that combine ‘unique gestural vocabulary, motion data-capture systems and user interfaces allowing her to sculpt and manipulate sound on stage’.

Ahead of Thursday’s awards ceremony, we spoke to a number of previous MPG Award winners to find out how their careers have prospered since and why the event is still so important 10 years on from its inaugural outing.