Deadline: 12 February 2024
Submissions are now open for the Charles Parker Prize for the Best Student Audio Feature.
The Trust is delighted to announce that in 2024 BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting the Charles Parker Prize winning features in their New Storytellers strand during the summer.
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.
What are they looking for?
- The 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 they’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.
Eligibility Criteria
- The Charles Parker Prize is open to all students currently studying UG and PG courses in the United Kingdom.
- Former students, who recently graduated from UK institutions (within the last year), can also enter.
- Submissions from those who attended accredited UK based media training courses are also welcome.
- The competition is not open to employees from major national or other professional broadcasters and/or if you supply material to these companies. There is no age limit to submissions.
- Entries should consist of an audio feature or documentary in English of between 10 and 15 minutes duration, produced by an individual student between 25th February 2023 and 12th February 2024.
- All entries must be the original work of the entrant under guidance of their tutor with no additional professional intervention and must not infringe the rights of any other party.
- Regardless of entrant’s status as a student, the competition is not open to paid employees (staff, contract or freelance) of professional broadcasting organisations and/or those supplying material to such broadcasters.
- Entries must be suitable for broadcast and use online by BBC Radio 4 under licence from the independent production company Soundscape Radio Productions Limited and not have been previously broadcast on a national broadcasting network.
For more information, visit Charles Parker Trust.
