Charles Parker Prize 2025
The Charles Parker Prize is awarded each year for the best student audio feature. The prize is open to any student at Further or Higher Education establishments throughout the United Kingdom.
The Charles Parker Prize 2025
for the Best Student Audio Feature
The Charles Parker Awards – named in honour of one of radio’s greatest documentary pioneers – have established an unparalleled reputation for excellence in radio and audio feature production by young people, and many of our winners have gone on to carve out successful professional careers in radio and audio production.
The Trust is delighted to announce that in 2025 BBC Radio 4 will again be broadcasting the Charles Parker Prize winning features in their New Storytellers
strand during the summer.
A shortlist of entries will be selected by a judging panel of radio producers and critics chaired by the BBC’s former Creative Director, Simon Elmes; to find the entrants adjudged to have most successfully used the radio feature medium. The judging panel will also select one overall winner – the Gold Charles Parker Prize Winner 2025.
The final decision on which five features will be selected for broadcast will be made by BBC Radio 4’s Commissioning Editor, Hugh Levinson:-
”The New Storytellers prize gives BBC Radio 4 and its listeners an opportunity to hear from vibrant, imaginative and talented producers with fresh takes on the world around us – while confirming our belief in the immersive power of documentary audio and reassuring us that it has a bright future.”
Hugh Levinson – Commissioning Editor, BBC Radio 4
Each winning student producer will then work alongside a mentor drawn from some of the very best feature-makers working in radio to adapt their features, as necessary, and each feature will be professionally mixed ready for broadcast.
The competition is now open to audio features (produced between 13th February 2024 and 10th February 2025) made by any student (or recently graduated student) in Further or Higher Education in the UK, and also by those who have attended an accredited media training course.
Because of Radio 4’s slot requirements, all entries MUST have a minimum duration of 10 minutes, and a maximum duration of 15 minutes.
What we’re looking for …
Our awards seek to capture some of the timeless originality that Charles Parker brought to his programmes, and especially to his legendary music-based documentation of working men’s and women’s lives, the Radio Ballads, such as The Ballad of John Axon and Singing the Fishing.
So we’re looking for programmes that innovatively capture the spirit of ordinary lives, their voices and their tunes, reinvented for the digital, multiplatform age. Your entry will have a sparklingly original idea, use the medium of radio feature to explore it to the full with humanity and imagination and, of course, make for a riveting audio presentation with storytelling at its heart.
The competition opened for Entries on Monday 25 November 2024 and the final deadline is Monday 10 February 2025.
This year we are asking that students complete the Entry Form (downloadable Word version or PDF version) and submit this (along with a WAV copy of their feature) to their tutor for verification. Entries must then be uploaded via WeTransfer by the FE or HE institution using the email address:- charlesparkerprize@hotmail.com
A shortlist of features will be announced in early March, with the nominees being invited to the award ceremony which will take place as the core of the Annual Charles Parker Day which will take place in London in Spring 2025 on a date to be confirmed.
The Gold Award winner and the four other winning features will be commissioned by the BBC through the independent radio production company Soundscape Productions, co-ordinators of the Charles Parker Prize since 2010.
